Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Leo Estrada carefully pulls plywood from the floor of the building at 480 Monterey Ave. Thanks to careful demolition, most of this building will be recycled into low-cost homes.

Lab to be reincarnated as homes

Material donated to a nonprofit

By Jeff Kearns

Developers who bought the Radiology & Associates building at 480 Monterey Ave. decided to try something different when the they demolished it: They recycled the pieces. Instead of using a bulldozer, workers removed everything by hand, including the plywood, windows, doors, air-conditioning units, sinks, toilets and wires. Even the concrete was ground up and re-used.

"It took a little longer," said Greg Howell of Los Gatos-Saratoga Development, which bought the old building to make way for new homes. "We could have had that building cleared in about four to five days if we'd just gone to the dump, but this way it took about three weeks."

"And Guadalupe Disposal is filling up fast," Tim McNeil, Howell's partner, added.

The two believe they're the first in Los Gatos to demolish and recycle a building, but they say they're going to try to do more demolitions like this one in the future. Both say they hope other developers will pick up on the idea and spread the trend.

"You can recycle everything," McNeil said, "but most people aren't willing to do it because it's so labor-intensive. Just the smallest pieces of scrap wood are the only things that aren't getting reused."

Howell and McNeil estimate that between 85 and 90 percent of the building was salvaged.

Most of the materials were trucked to a nonprofit organization in Oregon which plans to use them to build affordable housing. San Jose-based Artesian Drilling, the contractor that did the demolition, donates old building materials to nonprofit organizations in Oregon, California and Mexico for use in building houses and other structures.

Los Gatos-Saratoga Development awarded the demolition bid to Artesian, even though it was more expensive, and also paid the cost of shipping three truckloads of material to Oregon.

McNeil says that, while it's a good idea for developers to consider recycling buildings, every situation has its own circumstances. "It should be left to builders to decide what's best to do, but builders should have a conscience as well," he said.

The 4,500-square-foot building went up in 1963 and for most of its life was a radiologist's office, Howell said, but in recent years it was being used by a group of doctors to store medical documents.

"The community and the town were both pushing to have that area go back from mixed use to residential," Howell said.

The developers bought the building in November and are getting ready to build three new homes on the site. They should be finished by next summer.

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