Category: Events and News
Posted by CRC on Aug 14, 2008

Photo of Shaun LaBarre, Deconstruction Professional and Manager at ReSource (www.resourceyard.org). 

 

As published in the August 10, 2008, Daily Camera (Boulder, Colorado Newspaper)

Building materials recovery program to salvage wood from convention stage

 

It may end up looking like any old jumble of two-by-fours or stacks of plywood, but this particular collection of wood — destined for Boulder by month’s end — will carry the weight of history.

It’s the structural lumber of the Democratic National Convention.

That’s to say it’s the skeleton of the podium that will hold the party’s dignitaries — former President Bill Clinton, recent presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton and the yet-to-be-announced Democratic vice presidential nominee of the United States, among other VIPs of the party.

It’s the plywood that will make up the myriad walkways concealing hundreds of miles of TV cable and phone wire. It’s the wood that will constitute the press stands where journalists can send stories from the floor of the Pepsi Center to readers all over the globe.

Spenser Villwock, deputy director for the Center for ReSource Conservation in Boulder, characterizes the unsung lumber forming the convention’s structural underpinnings as nothing less than “historical artifact.”

“This is a two-by-four, for example, that has a story,” he said. “This is American history, after all.”

And Boulder residents have the chance to buy a piece of that history as soon as the convention wraps up, tears down and ships out of town.

ReSource, a program that collects and resells usable building materials, will be trucking two tons of structural lumber from the convention to its collection sites in Boulder and Fort Collins.

That means that instead of being sledgehammered to the ground, the temporary structures at the convention will be painstakingly disassembled so the wood can recovered.

Villwock said the lumber will be separated from the rest of ReSource’s materials inventory and sold for “fair market value” on a first-come, first-served basis.

He anticipates that some people will simply come to get sturdy pieces of wood at a discount, while others will discern the more ethereal and transcendental qualities in the lumber.

“They can know they are purchasing something that held a part of American history,” he said.

Natalie Wyeth, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Convention Committee, said convention officials have no problem with the idea of people preserving a piece of the stage as if it were a chip of stone off the Berlin Wall.

“If it means that someone wants to use it as a memento, that still meets our goal,” she said.

And that goal is doing what it takes to live up to the oft-mentioned DNC mantra: making the Aug. 25-28 extravaganza the greenest political convention ever.

Diverting 4,000 pounds of wood from the landfill and into the ReSource materials recovery network is a great way to walk the talk, Wyeth said.

For now, Villwock said convention officials and ReSource have only hammered out an agreement to recover wood from the Pepsi Center.

Which means the most historic stage of the week — the one Democratic presidential nominee-to-be Barack Obama stands upon Aug. 28 to give his acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High — is still up for grabs.

Villwock said he will be trying hard over the next week or so to convince convention officials to let ReSource recover the remnants of that structure and bring an even weightier piece of history to Boulder.