5 Questions for Deconstruction Expert Emily Freeman

By Sarah Currie-Halpern

Emily Freeman is the Policy Advisor on circular economy for the City of Boulder whose work focuses on local deconstruction efforts. As a young woman she lived in Japan, where she saw firsthand how a modern country could prioritize the reuse and recycling of building materials. After returning to the U.S., she received her master’s in Sustainability at Arizona State University and dove into public and private sector work, including helping run the City of Denver’s environmental management system. Now knee-deep in the deconstruction movement, she’s the perfect person to speak on the past success, present challenges, and future potential of scrapping demolition for good. We sat down to chat about it all.

What does your circular economy-focused work entail?

Within this role I approach buildings and building material recycling the same way that we look at residential systems—how we can optimize for material recovery, looking at the quality of the material coming in, and applying that same set of programmatic skills to different areas. In the last seven years there’s been a shift towards a circular economy. The circular economy allows us to not just think of moving towards zero waste because zero waste still perpetuates that we can just recycle our way out of these problems. We can’t. In the circular economy, we’re taking a step back and saying, ‘How can we maximize the reuse and recovery of these materials, keeping them at their highest and best use for as long as possible?’ We look at different policies and ordinances that will help us perpetuate the use of materials for as long as possible.

What are the biggest obstacles to deconstruction’s adoption?

We're fighting against what has become established as the norm. Demolition became the norm with the advent of urban renewal and the invention of large machinery. It allowed us to remove buildings at a much faster pace. If you look at buildings from the 1950s on, one in 17 of those buildings has been demolished. Our building stock is going by the wayside at a much faster rate than we recognize. Because demolition has become so prevalent, it’s easy for people to clear out a certain area to bring in urban renewal efforts and say, ‘I'm going to revitalize this.’ It gets couched as a revitalization: ‘I'm going to make this area newer, brighter, shinier,’ but not realizing that there are valuable material resources that are tied up in these buildings that are being forever lost through demolition. If you go back 100 years from this point, deconstruction was the norm. We're trying to figure out how we can shift back. But we're in a capitalistic society. We want our permits and our buildings to go up faster. So you're looking at cheaper material inputs, you're looking at faster means of construction, and how you can get buildings down and new buildings in their place faster.

How do you counter the arguments that deconstruction takes too much time and money compared to demolition?

A lot of demolition companies are trying to say that deconstruction doesn't make sense. They say, ‘I can tear down this house in two days and run a minimum crew with large equipment that I already own.’ Their initial cost is lower than the cost of deconstruction. For a similar size house, deconstruction is likely to take about 10 to 14 days. You're going to need a crew of five to six people. You've got five skilled laborers versus two laborers who are basically just operating that heavy machinery. But the financial benefit of deconstruction is in the current IRS tax code, which allows for the property owner to utilize a building material appraisal to then donate that material to a nonprofit. The property owner can work with their CPA to work out the tax donation. A full structure deconstruction allows you to take that itemized deduction and then, through your taxes, you're able to offset or even make money on deconstruction. But we don't have those demolition contractors taking that approach. They don’t understand that there are tax benefits back to that customer, and that if they add in skilled labor to their workforce, that they can not only make money on this but provide additional value both to the workforce and to the community.

Much of the conversation around deconstruction focuses on residential buildings. Where do commercial properties fit in here?

Commercial deconstruction is starting to grow. The deconstruction industry has its roots in residential properties, but cities like Boulder and Palo Alto are both larger cities now requiring deconstruction of commercial properties. It is a partnership, not only with deconstruction contractors and different nonprofits that will accept this building material, but also with city staff. Structural engineers reassess and evaluate the structural integrity of building materials coming out of commercial buildings that allow for reuse to happen. And there are different ways and different niches of recovering building materials that aren’t necessarily from a structural perspective, but that look at how we can match these sets of materials to other commercial structures as well.

It has been interesting to see it grow in Boulder. We have maybe four to six commercial buildings that are permitted for deconstruction each year. Our shining example was a city-owned property, the Boulder Community Hospital, that we deconstructed in 2023. By the end of 2024 we had matched all 584 steel I-beams for reuse. 89 of those beams were matched to the new construction of the city’s Fire Station 3. The remaining beams have gone to other city projects and about six other private projects. Those were all vetted to ensure it was for reuse, and we also ensured that the transportation would be offset by the carbon savings from recovering that material. 

What does the future of deconstruction hold, and where do you see that future starting to happen?

I was fortunate enough to go to the Netherlands this past October to meet with their leaders and architects on the work they're doing. It blows us out of the water. How they are looking at reuse is so innovative. In the U.S. you've got developers and architects saying, ‘Here's my design.’ They go to a reuse or salvage store and they think, ‘Well, that doesn't really fit the aesthetic. That doesn't fit my designs.’ But in the Netherlands, they have created an online inventory of all these different available stocks of reuse material. When they decide to build a 2,000 square foot home, they utilize their existing stock to create the design. They're not trying to shoehorn in designs. They are designing with the reuse stock in mind.

That is a fundamental shift away from how developers and architects design projects in the U.S. Why are we not doing that? We're not doing that because we haven't normalized deconstruction. We haven't prioritized it, especially on a national level. If we don't prioritize it first, how do we even get that stock? It's the chicken and egg. But if you don't have the supply, the demand is not going to be there. 

If you do create a stockpile or a warehouse of building materials, these developers and architects can have confidence that they can create designs that will allow for reuse to be accepted once they reach final inspection. It’s an entire policy shift where we need to look at what materials could be sourced from existing buildings. Are the policies and the building codes supportive of allowing the reincorporation of that salvage material back into the design? Does it provide the environmental product declaration? Does it provide that level of specificity that cities are looking for for those carbon reductions? 

Only then are we going to see additional movement towards deconstruction and the circular movement towards the reuse of those materials. It's not just taking them out and cycling through recycling processes. It's taking them out, then matching the codes and policies to allow for the reincorporation of that material into new designs. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.