Building Design + Construction – Boulder, Colo., puts Sustainable Deconstruction Policy into Action

Ameresco, a Massachusetts-based cleantech integrator and renewable energy owner and operator, has been working with the City of Boulder, Colo., on the company’s first sustainable deconstruction project, a demolition of the municipality’s former Boulder Community Health Hospital, which had been closed since April 2019.

Boulder has set a target to divert 85 percent of the city’s waste away from landfills by 2025. The former hospital’s deconstructed building materials, and specifically its structural steel, will be used to construct a new fire station and other projects within the city. The firehouse, to be located at 30th and Valmont in Boulder, is scheduled to open in mid-2024. During an early deconstruction phase, the hospital’s pumps, motors, doors, and fixtures, as well as other materials, were auctioned rather than dumped into landfills.

The 250,000-sf hospital’s demolition occurred in two phases, says Rob Sevier, Ameresco’s Senior Account Executive in Denver: the interior demo began in 2019, was slowed because of COVID, and was completed last year. The exterior demo—which includes removing the hospital’s concrete floors, steel, and exteriors—required new permits before it was started last March. Sevier says the deconstruction should be completed sometime this fall.

“This deconstruction project is an important foundational example of innovative sustainability for the communities where we live and work,” said Louis Maltezos, Ameresco’s Executive Vice President, in a prepared statement. Based in Chicago, Maltezos oversees the company’s activities in the central U.S. and in Canada.

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