Summer is the season for construction, whether building houses or just updating existing ones. You can visit one of the many stores that are popping up across the nation to sell salvaged building materials. I paid a visit to one of them, the ReStore in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Started in 2001 by the Center for Ecological Technology, it takes used and surplus stock from the building industry to sell to the public. There's even a free pile: something that warms the cockles of this frugal Yankee heart!

I've come to talk with manager John Grossman. As I get out of my car, I see everything from magnificent clawfoot tubs to modern spas, doors, windows, heaps of old lumber, radiators of various vintages, tub surrounds and marble countertops.

There’s a lot of activity around me: pickups pulling in and out to drop some stuff off and take other stuff home. I caught up with Grossman and asked him what the purpose of the ReStore is. “Our mission is to keep building materials out of the landfill,” he told me. “And we do that by recovering the materials in a bunch of different ways and creating a market for them here in Springfield.”

He took me over to a building that had just come in, really just a tall pile of very old boards and timbers, with ancient joints of mortise and tenon. It was a completely deconstructed post and beam house, vintage 1726. Until recently, it had resided in Rutland, Massachusetts -- the oldest house in town.

“The very first thing that happened was that the furniture makers came in an snapped up the flat boards we had, because it's a species that doesn't exist anymore -- the American chestnut. And if it's already in boards the furniture maker is one step closer to being able to turn it into furniture or a counter or flooring.” Other furniture makers carted away the bigger pieces to mill down and homeowners took away the beams to use as decorative accents.

Grossman told me recycling building materials is an idea as old as buildings. “The facade of the pyramids is gone because people pulled it off to reuse on another building; if you go to Rome, you see an obelisk that people dragged from Egypt and stuck in their piazza and put their own carvings on. It’s just a very old concept that materials still have their value even when the building that they're in doesn't serve a contemporary purpose for them anymore.”

We went inside the cavernous space of the ReStore, where every inch of space was crammed with a panoply of parts: cabinets, lighting, plumbing fixtures, drawer pulls and items so old I couldn’t identify their purpose.

I wanted to know what was behind the creation of the ReStore. Grossman says good old Yankee frugality had something to do with it. “People save a door and say, ‘I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I couldn't throw it away.’” But beyond that, he added, a new Massachusetts ban on waste has created a demand: mixed debris from a construction and demolition site can’t be thrown into a landfill. Instead, contractors have to pay good money to ship it out to Ohio. The ban is designed to encourage contractors to divert materials to the recycling and reuse markets.

But even the ReStore recycles what it can’t sell. Grossman told me, “If something arrives here and we can't sell it -- for instance, a French door that has a broken pane of glass -- we put it in our free pile. There’s a whole secondary market of people who might not ever spend money to buy it, but will take it for free and refurbish it.” The ReStore has a very small dumpster, so they’re forced to recycle or reuse. “We hardly ever throw anything away.”

Keeping used building materials out of the waste stream and landfills is one benefit of the ReStore. Another is reducing the carbon footprint of the building industry. Every product has an embodied energy: all the raw materials, the labor, the manufacturing and transportation that go into creating it. Take a window, for example. “You've got all that energy in there and when, for whatever reason, that window is going to come out, if you crunch it up and throw it away, you spend a little bit of energy and poof! All the embodied energy is gone,” Grossman says. “Whereas you could probably spend the same amount of energy and take it out and transport it to a store like ours and then you recapture all the labor, raw materials and transportation that went into creating that window in the first place.”

One challenge salvage stores like the ReStore face is that it's still affordable to put waste on a train to some other state (like Ohio) to bury it, making demolition, rather than deconstruction, still a viable option for contractors. Grossman would like to see the price of that waste better reflect its true environmental cost. “Instead of it being 18 dollars a ton in Ohio, it should be a hundred dollars a ton. Then people would be looking at us as more of a price equivalent option.”

But payoffs exist right now. Builders who use local salvaged materials can rack up LEED points, which can translate into a nice price premium when selling the finished construction.

Meanwhile, I did a little recycling myself at the ReStore. I snagged a sweet little marble countertop for ten bucks and put it to use rolling out dough for blackberry pie. The berries were “salvaged” from bushes on the local golf course -- ripe for the picking.