Lessons learned in building clean and green

Lessons learned in building clean and green
Tags: Going Green
January 30, 2012 - Ted Clifton

I was young once; I worked hard, I achieved a lot, and I had risen to a position of some responsibility within my company. I was in charge of anything having to do with carpentry, in a company devoted to road construction. I worked often at logging camps and other remote sites, and the spring of 1979 found me in Coffman Cove, Alaska.

My project involved re-building the cookhouse; constructing new cabinets on-site, adding a new covered walkway, and site-constructing trusses to re-roof the building. All of this work required a lot of cutting, planing and sanding, which in turn produced a lot of sawdust.

To me, today's sawdust was no different from tomorrow's; it could just pile up until the job was complete. I had been given a corner of the heavy equipment shop to work in, but the mechanics seemed quite unhappy with me and my sawdust. They asked me to clean up after myself; I didn't. They begged and beseeched me; I still didn't clean up my mess. I kept putting them off, explaining that I would just be making more sawdust the next day, and that I would be done & gone in a very short time.

One evening, upon returning from my work at the cookhouse, I found my bed completely filled with sawdust! It was on the sheets, between the sheets, in the pillowcase, everywhere! There would be no sleeping until I cleaned up the horrendous mess!

I returned to the cookhouse to get my shop-vac, where I found most of the crew laughing at me. The master mechanic was not laughing, he was deadly serious. With a shotgun (yes, really!) pointed at my head, he explained to me the hazards of sawdust in a heavy equipment shop. The acid in the hemlock dust was extremely corrosive, and as it blew around the building, it would settle on anything and everything, especially anything coated with oil. This included delicate engine parts that were being painstakingly rebuilt. Failure of these parts could cost thousands of dollars in equipment damage, and could even result in injury or death to an operator or driver.

I took this lesson to heart, and the next morning I moved my cutting outside under a tarp. I would only bring the tools back inside when they had been cleaned up and the dust blown away. Amazingly, in addition to having happy mechanics, my own allergies became less troublesome. By spending a few minutes each hour on clean-up, I actually improved my production!

Several years later, when I formed my own home building company, I understood inherently that the custom home we were building was not just our job site, it was somebody's house. To the owner, if we left a mess at the end of the day, we were disrespecting their house. What kind of animals would leave orange peels and spilled food on the floor of someone's house? I did not want my crew (or my sub-contractors) to be seen in that way. If we wanted respect, we had to respect our client's property.

We all know that nosy neighbors will visit our job sites at night. How clean we leave the job site can have an effect not only on their safety (which can be a legal and insurance issue), it can also have an effect on how willing they would be to have us work on their house. We have had several customers tell us that our clean job sites were one of the reasons they selected us as their contractor.

To sum it up, the benefits of keeping a clean job site are:

Better, safer working environment for higher production, and fewer workplace injuries;

Cleaner air to breath for workers and visitors to the site, less health problems;

The respect of your clients, workers, sub-contractors, and other visitors to your site;

Improved profitability for your company, and improved indoor air quality for your customer.

We have employed a number of systems over the years to reduce the amount of sawdust in the home; these include doing most cutting outside, or when cutting must be done inside, restricting it to one room that can be isolated from the others with a plastic barrier. Regular sorting of scrap materials keep them out of the way, and also make them more likely to get re-used in the construction, instead of wasted in the dumpster.

We also employ systems to reduce or eliminate the use of any toxic materials. This is as much for our own worker's comfort and production rates as it is for our customer, but the benefits are mutually appreciated. Moving lots of air through the work area between coats of paint, or after drywall is taped and textured helps keep moisture-related problems to a minimum.

We leave the job site clean each day when we leave, and this gives us added authority to insist that our sub-contractors leave it as clean as they found it when they are done with their own work. Those who refuse are not invited back. We post our recycle plan on the wall, and contractually require our sub-contractors to adhere to it. We provide both food-waste trash cans, and recycle trash cans on each of our building sites, clearly marked.

We also invite our customers to participate in the cleanup with us, which gives them more hands-on ownership of the job, and helps keep costs down. Our customers are usually quite happy to have this opportunity, because they know that they are the ultimate beneficiaries of a cleaner, safer, healthier home.