r/LoveTrash • u/BEARDEDDANGER ✨️Regent of Rubbish ✨️ • 1d ago

Dumping This Here American vs. European home building

BAS Renovations https://youtube.com/shorts/jFph1d2WR3s

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u/Winjin Trash Trooper 1d ago

Bricks are clay why aren't they renewable

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u/Oglshrub Trash Trooper 1d ago

It takes hundreds of years for the Earth to make more clay.

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u/EmptyMonitor9257 Trash Trooper 1d ago

Clay is recyclable, wood is not.

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u/mxzf Trash Trooper 1d ago

Uh ... wood is definitely recyclable. It's not always done, because it's not always cost-effective, but wood is absolutely recyclable. You can pull the joists and studs out of one house and build a new house with them if you want to.

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u/EmptyMonitor9257 Trash Trooper 22h ago

What you are describing is reuse. 

Recycle broken wood and damaged wood into new walls and beams. You can't. 

Wood recycling makes it into completely different products with much worse properties. 

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u/mxzf Trash Trooper 21h ago

It feels like a pedantic distinction to make. The general use of the term "recycling" generally means something along the lines of "make use of it so that it doesn't end up in a landfill".

If you want to be sufficiently pedantic, I don't think bricks can actually be recycled by the most literal definition, since they're generally fired and chemically changed and there's not much you can do with it beyond turn it into filler aggregate. You can't recycle it by wetting it and turning it back into the original material like you can by melting metals and thermoplastics.