Shortsighted Self-Interest
(and a new role for Butterfly)
By
Ted Reiff
One of my favorite writers and philosophers is Ayn Rand, who used the term “intellectual self-interest” to describe behaviors that clearly benefit the doer both in the short run and long term. I was reminded of Rand recently when I came across three situations in which people clearly acted in their own self-interest, but for short-term gains only. These people will most certainly be hurt by their actions in the long run. Ultimately their behavior will prove self-destructive.
The first instance involved the construction of a public building in Philadelphia. The plumber’s union had threatened to strike because the building was set to be equipped with waterless urinals. Waterless urinals do not require the installation of as much pipe as flushing urinals, which upset the union membership. The construction savings to taxpayers (including hard-working union members) would have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the annual water consumption of the building would have been reduced by 1.6 million gallons, but still the union refused to proceed.
I encountered a similar incident in St. Louis earlier this year, when I toured a LEED-certified commercial building. Due to union demands, this building’s waterless urinals were needlessly plumbed right up to, but not into, the urinals -- a waste of labor, money and materials. Show me a rational justification for that!
The final incident was a little closer to home. I received a telephone call from a contractor who was demolishing a 200,000 square-foot building in Fremont, California, to make room for a new commercial structure. He had already hired a traditional demolition contractor and wanted to know if TRP wanted the lumber from the roof, which included glue-lams up to 80 feet long, plywood and other materials. I declined the offer, because the volume of material was too large for us to handle and because he had not hired TRP to do deconstruction. However, I referred him to Carl Hanson, a TRP advisor and one of the largest used lumber dealers in the state.
Carl had several telephone conversations with the contractor and offered him $70,000 for the lumber, which included the shipping costs. Carl also explained how the demolition contractor should remove the beams to limit damage to the materials. After considering Carl’s offer for a couple of days, the contractor turned it down, without a counter offer, and sent all the lumber to the landfill. Why? Because the demolition contractor convinced the general contractor that salvaging the roofing materials would be too much trouble, and -- get this -- there was too much junk hanging off the glue-lams to make it worthwhile. That “junk” consisted of 4x12s over 15 feet long.
Carl estimated that 20 tractor-trailer loads of lumber and plywood could have been salvaged from that job -- the equivalent of about 40 loads of trees coming out of the forest. A truckload of lumber usually amounts to 16,000 board feet of lumber. According to Bob Falk at USDA Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, it takes approximately 13,000 board feet to build a typical 2,000 square-foot house in the U.S., making this disposal the equivalent of 25 such houses.
In my not-so-humble opinion, nothing close to $70,000 worth of time and expense would have been required to salvage that lumber; it was simply more expedient for the demolition and building contractors to throw it away. Considering the increases in disposal costs that this contractor faces in the future, when local landfills reach capacity, you have a classic case of shortsightedness. Maybe cities should offer two types of building and demolition permits -- regular and Neanderthal.
All three of these cases typify short-term self-interest –the stupid kind, not the intellectual kind. Remember Butterfly, the young woman who camped out in various trees to prevent their being harvested? Maybe she and other activists should start sitting on top of buildings that are slated for demolition! If we can slow the rate of lumber disposal, fewer trees will have to be harvested. |
