Objective:

Tens of thousands of World War II-era wooden buildings await removal on Department of Defense (DoD) installations across the United States. Lead pigments were used extensively in exterior and interior oil paints before the 1970s. Wood coated with lead-based paint (LBP) makes the removal and disposal of debris from older buildings particularly problematic. Landfilling is the most common disposal option for building debris, with the reuse or recovery of the LBP-coated wood seldom attempted. In some states, such as California, LBP-coated wood is often regulated to disposal in a hazardous waste landfill at great expense in terms of both money and the rapid filling of landfills with bulk waste.

The wood used in many of these buildings has been shown to be prime quality, old-growth wood of potentially high value for reuse. Based on small-scale tests and market predictions, a process to mechanically remove the LBP, reprofile the recovered wood into high-value wood products, and market these products for profit appears to be a viable means to reclaim the wood. The key to success is a system that can easily and economically process the wood, which becomes harder with age and is potentially full of nails that would quickly ruin the blades of conventional woodworking equipment, into value-added products. A newly developed mobile system that can "delead" the wood in the field is now available for demonstration and validation as part of an overall wood recovery and waste minimization process.

Technology Description:

This project will demonstrate a mobile wood planer and recovery system and validate the overall economics of the process as compared to typical demolition and landfilling of LPB-coated wood building materials. The demonstration will be conducted at Camp Roberts, an Army National Guard installation in central California, where several hundred World War II-era wooden buildings await removal. Selected buildings will be systematically deconstructed to provide feedstock for the wood planer system. The recovered wood will then be sold as is or remanufactured into value-added wood products. The economics of the entire process will be documented and compared to recent building removal operations at this same site where all of the LBP-coated wood was landfilled.

Expected Benefits:

With millions of square feet of old buildings to be removed across all Services, a demonstrated process to decrease the costs of this removal would be of true benefit. However, the projected benefits are not only in potential dollars saved but also in environmental terms of saving significant amounts of old-growth wood from being landfilled as well as increasing the longevity of landfills if large volumes of wood are diverted to recovery and reuse. The revenue from the sale of the reclaimed wood and/or finished products could significantly reduce the building removal costs. This technology is also transferable to other federal and state agencies, including land reuse authorities, which face similar problems of building removal and disposal of wood coated with LBP. (Anticipated Project Completion - 2007)

Contact:

Mr. Richard Lampo
U.S. Army Engineer Research & Development Center
Construction Engineering Research Laboratory
P.O. Box 9005
Champaign, IL 61826-9005
Telephone: (217) 373-6765
Fax: (217) 373-6732
E-mail: r-lampo@cecer.army.mil