In scrapping their home and choosing to have everything that was eligible recycled, the Barry family received $100,000 dollars in tax refund, and helped the construction of new homes. What’s more, they’ve prevented the composite parts of an entire house being sent to landfills.

Habitat for Humanity, who - along with California Deconstruction and Building Materials – handled the project, stated that,

“Our primary goal is always to raise money for more homebuilding, but at the same time, we’re able to keep tons of potential trash out of the landfills…And the rule of thumb is that every dollar in sales equates to about one pound of debris being saved from the landfill”.

It is estimated that at least 80% of the whole house was recycled, including bricks, the copper plumbing, windows, wooden constructions, and even household appliances.

Such a system, in providing economic as well as ethical incentives for participants, has, through organisations like California Deconstruction and Building Materials and Habitat for Humanity, received a number of interested parties. That the scheme will create new houses for those without them, and removes new manufacture – and the problems of carbon emissions that the process brings with it – is making the scheme something of a niche success.

It is hoped that Tricia and Mike Barry will set something of a high profile example for the scheme, with the house itself totalling 2,250 square foot before deconstruction, and the tax relief pay out, at $100,000 beginning particularly high. Habitat for Humanity, though, are serving communities worldwide, and the hope will be that more impetus will be placed on the places that the material goes than on those who recycled.

One might finish this story of environmental endeavour, then, with a statement from the Habitat for Humanity website:

“Every morning one third of the world’s population – that’s two billion people – will wake up in appalling poverty … squalid, spirit-crushing poverty. Most were born into those conditions and many will die in them … too many will die as a consequence of them…Poverty housing damages people’s lives in so many ways. It’s dirty, smelly and often unsafe, it affects people’s health and wellbeing; their children’s education; their employment prospects. But most of all, poverty housing traps people in poverty and robs them of hope and opportunity. It oppresses the soul and keeps the poorest people poor.”