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Sunflower Munitions Plant: 87% of a Warehouse Kept Out of the Landfill
CASE STUDY - SELECTIVE DECONSTRUCTION - WAREHOUSE STRUCTURE
87%
MATERIAL DIVERSION RATE
578
TONS DIVERTED FROM LANDFILL
578
TONS DIVERTED FROM LANDFILL
87%
MATERIAL DIVERSION RATE
530
TONS COâ‚‚e NET CARBON BENEFIT
The Challenge
A warehouse at the former Sunflower Munitions Plant was slated for removal. Conventional demolition would have treated the entire structure as waste, hauling decades of structural lumber, steel, and framing to a landfill in a matter of days.
The building had other value. Selective deconstruction offered a way to recover it, but only if the material could be separated and removed without adding weeks to the schedule or cost to the budget. That was the question the project had to answer.
The Approach
Rather than mechanically demolishing the structure, Dark Horse dismantled it piece by piece. Crews worked from the roof down, systematically separating materials by recovery pathway:
Reusable structural lumber — carefully removed, sorted, and stacked for resale
Structural steel — separated and routed to recycling
Mixed wood that couldn't be reused — processed into wood chips and converted into mulch
C&D debris — sent to a regional processing facility for recycling
Residual waste — the only fraction sent to landfill
DECONSTRUCTION PROCESS
Intact building
Stripped trusses
Bare slab
Stacked lumber on flatbed
The Results
652 tons of material handled. 578 tons diverted.
The Carbon Story
Deconstruction's biggest climate benefit isn't recycling — it's avoidance. Every board recovered is a board that doesn't have to be harvested, milled, dried, and manufactured somewhere else.
The carbon assessment for this project found 1.17 million pounds of COâ‚‚e in net carbon benefit (530 tons) after transportation emissions — just 56,530 pounds COâ‚‚e — were deducted. The overwhelming majority of the benefit came from preserving the carbon already stored in reclaimed structural lumber and avoiding the emissions of producing replacement wood products.
Why It Matters
The Sunflower project shows that selective deconstruction is not a niche or symbolic gesture. It's a practical, repeatable approach to building removal that:
The building had other value. The question was whether it could be recovered without blowing up the schedule or the budget.
Diverts the vast majority of material from landfill
Preserves the embodied carbon in existing building materials
Returns valuable lumber and steel to productive use
Delivers a measurable environmental result the property owner can document
Most buildings are worth more taken apart than knocked down. This one proved it — 87% of the way.
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