Recycling
They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Google tells me this expression was first coined in 1860, long before the days of throwing all our rubbish in commercial landfill. Nowadays the need for recycling is surely much greater.
Personally, I do not get a lot of satisfaction going to the tip. The exception to this, as it is with all hot-blooded males, is when you get to throw full glass panes into the pit and watch them smash. That is pretty great, but generally speaking, I leave landfill feeling slightly dirty. Granted, landfill is the only way to deal with building waste, but for anyone raised on Tidy Kiwi certificates, you cannot help but feel a little bit like a litter bug.
Fortunately, SGB is very much in favour of employees recycling site materials. In the renovation game, we deal primarily with old rimu framed houses. Any unpainted timbers make superb firewood, but these old natives can also make beautiful building timber. For comparison, most of the pine you would buy off the shelf today will have been grown in a plantation in the last thirty years. The rimu, matai and kauri you find in old houses will likely be over three hundred years old, hard, marbled and often a deep red in colour.
Working with this sort of timber gives the guys an opportunity to practise a high end, finishing carpentry you rarely see any more in modern building. Salvaging the wood does however require a large, industrial sized tool called a thicknesser, and a lot of space to work in. SGB is more than happy to provide a thicknesser, yard space and other tools needed if it means that native timbers can be recycled off site and the lumber of pre-contact New Zealand can be given a new lease of life. As a further deal sweetener to the guys recycling, SGB is happy to provide and fixings, hardware and finishing oils that go into the building of furniture with re-purposed timber.
Any prospective clients of SGB who come to our office for a meeting with Sam will find him sitting behind his ergonomic computer stand, made of weatherboards recycled from his house.
The cost of living is high, and between recycled timber being used in employee’s own renovations, being used to create furniture for sale and heating houses through winter, SGB is proud to support these recycling initiatives.
Ben’s planter boxes really speak to the great history of Kiwi ingenuity and resourcefulness. These huge Totara sleepers were used a century ago to build the first wharf at Mana Island, back when it was a ranching station. DOC then disassembled the wharf and used the to build the frame of a deck behind one of their research houses. We then rebuilt the deck, heli-lifted the timber back to the mainland, and which point Ben scooped the timber away from going to landfill, gave it a good waterblast, and is currently turning it into planter boxes.
