For the past several months here at Blackford and Sons, we’ve been in the process of creating a new division that is completely focused on providing wood products crafted from 100% reclaimed or recycled wood. We’re pleased to announce that we have completed this new division – Blackford & Sons Reclaimed Woods. This new Reclaimed Woods division of Blackford and Sons specializes in reclaimed wood flooring, reclaimed timbers, beams, and reclaimed log fireplace mantels.

Most Common Reclaimed Woods

Reclaimed antique lumber is quickly becoming one of my favorite types of wood to work with,especially when I get to saw each wood plank from a beam, rather than planks already sawn to size. Beyond the obvious qualities of reclaimed lumber such as its eco-friendliness, it is fascinating to see how antique woods (Heart Pine, in this case) stand up to decades of use. Though there are many different species of antique wood to choose from, the most easily available and prominent are Heart Pine, Chestnut, and Oak.

Heart Pine has a rich history here in America being used in many different applications from plank flooring in homes, to ship building. Unlike the typical evergreen, Heart Pine is extremely hard due to its very slow growth. In fact, it rivals some hardwoods measuring 1225 in the Janka Hardness Test, whereas hardwood White Oak measures 1360. This level of hardness is due to the fact that Heart Pine takes anywhere from 200-400 years to fully mature. In comparison, Southern Yellow Pine measures just 870 on the Janka scale.

Green building (aka, sustainable design, and green architecture) is the practice of increasing the efficiency with which buildings use resources — energy, water, and materials — while reducing building impacts on human health and the environment during the building’s life cycle, through better site placement, design, construction, operation, maintenance, and removal.

Green buildings are designed to reduce the overall impact of the built environment on human health and the natural environment by:

• Efficiently using energy, water, and other resources
• Protecting occupant health and improving employee productivity
• Reducing waste, pollution and environmental degradation

Green Building Practices

Green building brings together a vast array of practices and techniques to reduce and ultimately eliminate the impacts of buildings on the environment and human health. It often emphasizes taking advantage of renewable resources, e.g., using sunlight through passive solar, active solar, and photovoltaic techniques and using plants and trees through green roofs, rain gardens, and for reduction of rainwater run-off. Many other techniques, such as using packed gravel for parking lots instead of concrete or asphalt to enhance replenishment of ground water, are used as well. Effective green buildings are more than just a random collection of environmental friendly technologies, however. They require careful, systemic attention to the full life cycle impacts of the resources embodied in the building and to the resource consumption and pollution emissions over a building’s complete life cycle.

On the aesthetic side of green architecture or sustainable design is the philosophy of designing a building that is in harmony with the natural features and resources surrounding the site. There are several key steps in designing sustainable buildings: specify ‘green’ building materials from local sources, reduce loads, optimize systems, and generate on-site renewable energy.

Green Building Materials

Building materials typically considered to be ‘green’ include rapidly renewable plant materials like bamboo (because bamboo grows very quickly) and straw, lumber from forests that are sustainably managed, dimension stone, recycled stone, recycled metal, and other products that are non-toxic, reusable, renewable, and/or recyclable (eg reclaimed barn wood, reclaimed hardwood flooring, Linoleum, sheep wool, panels made from paper flakes, compressed earth block, adobe, baked earth, rammed earth, clay, vermiculite, flax linen, sisal, sea grass, cork, expanded clay grains, coconut, wood fiber plates, calcium sand stone…) The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) also suggests using recycled industrial goods, such as coal combustion products, foundry sand, and demolition debris in construction projects. Building materials can also be extracted and manufactured locally to the building site in order to minimize the energy embedded in their transportation.

For more information on green building, follow the links below.

http://www.greenbuilding.com/

http://www.usgbc.org/

http://www.epa.gov/greenbuilding/

http://www.builditgreen.org/