John Mooallem profiles the work of Brad Guy, president of the Building Materials Reuse Association, a nonprofit in Pittsburgh that supports the fledgling deconstruction industry. NYT
Construction waste, either from the construction or demolition phase of a building's life is estimated to account for upwards of a half of all waste entering America's landfills.
However, it isn't just about reducing the amount of waste entering landfills. There are multiple economic and social benefits realized through building deconstruction.

“This is a manufacturing process,” Guy told me. “That’s the way you should look at this. We are making building materials.” In fact, the aim of deconstruction has always been more socioeconomic than environmental: employing local people to harvest a stock of low-cost materials so that lower-income homeowners and rental landlords in the same area can afford to maintain their properties. Denhart talks about houses as being part of a community’s collective history and wealth. Deconstruction maintains and redistributes that wealth. “The community is really taking care of itself,” he says. “It’s protecting its identity.” Moreover, a study Guy wrote with two environmental engineers uncovered an empirical argument for keeping those materials local: on average, shipping them more than 20 miles away for resale can cancel out any energy conserved by reclaiming them.