Woman-owned Colorado deconstruction company takes recycling to new heights

With the state of Colorado ranking as one of the worst states in the country for recycling, one Commerce City business is taking steps to reuse as much as they can when it comes to construction.

"We take a surgical approach to demolition, which means we're disassembling the house to try to salvage and recycle as much building material as possible," said Anna Perks. "We're essentially unbuilding the house, dismantling it and sorting the material as we go."

Perks is the owner of Perks Deconstruction, a female-owned business that started roughly five years ago.

"About 40% of our landfill consists of construction and demolition material and a lot of it is good, reusable material," she said.

Perks showed off one of her team's latest deconstruction projects: a home in Erie with a lot of sentimental value to its owners. They wanted to make sure it could be used again for future construction projects.

"All the cabinets, doors, fixtures, finishes, that will all get donated and reused as those items. And then a lot of the wood, we're salvaging at our warehouse," said Perks. "Other lumber that can't be reused, it will be made into mulch."

When Perks Deconstruction gets involved in tearing down a home, each piece of material has a renewed purpose.

"We have over 8 billion people on the planet and we're using resources faster than we can regenerate them. So this is a way for us to recover materials and give (them) another life as something else," said Perks.

"I think it puts us in a different mindset to where we're reusing rather than just trashing," said Matt Camps, who is a project manager at Paramount Remodeling.

Perks says they have salvaged over 6.5 million pounds of material from the landfill since her company first began. More municipalities across Colorado are also moving towards making it a requirement for construction and demolition projects to salvage existing materials.

"Denver is moving in that direction and Lakewood," she said. "Fort Collins has a couple of recycling requirements. And Pitkin County."

With recent grant funding from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, Perks says they hope to take deconstruction across the metro area to new heights.

"The first grant allowed us to buy a pickup truck ... so that we're able to sort material on the job sites," said Perks. "The second grant that we received helped us fund and start up our reclaimed lumber warehouse. So, they're both critical in helping us get started."

It's that critical support that's helping her team support keeping Colorado greener.

"To give things another life, which reduces the amount of resources we have to pull from the earth," she said.