It took a lot of building materials to turn the Convention Center at Oncenter into a 48 lane bowling alley for three months as 30,000 women bowlers poured into the City of Syracuse for the 2011 USBC Women’s Championships. Habitat for Humanity saw this as a golden opportunity to replenish its warehouse, and coordinated a massive volunteer deconstruction effort to salvage materials in cooperation with USBC-hired demolition crews. Syracuse EFC staff volunteered their time one of the days to get a first-hand look at what goes into — and what comes out of — a deconstruction operation. The USBC deconstruction yielded 47 hollow core doors, 1 pallet of drywall, 500 sheets of plywood, 32,000 lineal feet of 2x4s, 1,000 lineal feet of framing lumber and 3,300 lineal feet of trim. The retail value of the material is more than $55,000, which, as deconstruction coordinator Greg Wright noted, is “an impressive gift.”
