Burning plastic...

Backyard burning of plastic ... is bad.
About 2 years ago my family and I moved from a rural area to a suburban cul-de-sac. Out on the rural road, we lived next to an old guy who burned all his trash every Sunday. He kept milk jugs on a clothesline, lined up to go in the stove, and he thought he was reducing his taxes by not needing a trash pickup (he didn't have a mailbox either - same logic - when there was something important for him they just stuffed it in our box).
Burn plastic in a managed incinerator and it's relatively problem free. It has high fuel value and in some cases if it's mixed waste, incineration and energy generation may be the best way to recapture valuable energy from it. But burn it in an uncontrolled manner in a campfire, why would you do that?
So we move to the somewhat swanky suburban area, and damned if one of my new neighbors, in a fancy stucco house with about 1000 figurines out front, isn't burning trash, supposedly incognito, in his backyard. What the hell? The acrid smoke drifts up from behind the place and goes right into my kid's bedroom window. I feel like going over there and strangling him; that's what he's doing to me.

You can get the book in the big box, but not the decking!

We're pleased to see CorrectDeck CX prominently featured on the cover of Steve Cory's new book 'Deck Designs'! (The lower picture on the cover is CorrectDeck CX in cedar). Starting on page 88, several decks built by Clemens Jellema of Fine Decks, Inc (primarily working in the Baltimore/Annapolis area) are featured, and three of them are built with CorrectDeck CX!

You can find this book in almost any big box store, but you can't find CorrectDeck CX in the big box store! Check out our dealer locator to find a local pro retailer.

Got my LEEP AP!

Whew! I was nervous. It's a two hour test and right down to the wire I was sweating it. During the test, you can mark questions that you're not sure of and go back to them (design flow rate for a water closet, anyone? Percent of site that must be recovered using native and adapted plants in order to obtain SSc5.2 Protect and Restore Habitat?). I was still in that process when I ran out of time. A little icon comes up on the screen that says YOU ARE OUT OF TIME. But then it just sits there and waits for you to push OK. You can take as much time as you like to sit there, out of time...
But I ended up crushing it, with 191 out of 200 points (about 90% right, it's graded on a curve). Still thinking there were a couple more I should have gotten but it's pass/fail and nobody cares what your score was...

Composite Decking *is* Recyclable

Greg Burnet's "What Makes a Deck Board Green" article points out that until we develop a 'USDA Organic' equivalent for sustainability, green-ness is subjective. However, as a manufacturer of wood-composite decking and railing, a value-added forest product, I feel obligated to address a couple of points that Mr. Burnet makes. Burnet argues that PVC can be recycled, while wood composites cannot. This just isn't true. Both wood-composites and PVC can be and are recycled. I believe the perception that wood-composites aren't recyclable may be based on confusion with fiberglass composites (such as are used for boat hulls). Or, said perception could be based on a 2005 report from the Healthy Building Network that asserted that the blend of ingredients in a wood-composite deckboard, since they can't be unmixed, can't be recycled (no doubt the summer intern that authored this poorly researched yet widely cited report is wearing a paper hat and listening for the beep of the friolator as we speak). In the meantime, we and others have recycled millions and millions of pounds of wood composite articles into tool trays, shutters, lobster trap runners, rot-resistant shims and many other everyday items. Wood-composites can be and are recycled. They represent an excellent environmental choice. Moreover, coextruded products such as CorrectDeck CX especially encourage the use of recycled feedstock, because color risk is eliminated. In 2008, our factory used more than 2 million pounds of recycled #5 polypropylene and many more millions of pounds of recycled hardwood fiber (which comes from the manufacture of golf tees and ice cream sticks). In order to facilitate cradle-to-cradle reuse and recycling, we mark all of our products with their resource content , and we have pioneered a collection program for composite decking jobsite scraps - which of course are recyclable, dammit!Wood -composites, especially those in the ultra-low maintenance category, can compete against the best wood and plastic products in performance, aesthetics and sustainability.

There is no such thing as Class A Fire Resistant Decking

Brands of composite decking and PVC decking now commonly promote themselves as having Class A Flame Spread Resistance. I know that sounds good, and Class A is probably better than Class B, but does it really mean anything? Essentially, no.
There is a standard (a standard and a test method are two different things - one is a requirement, like windows having a certain impact resistance in hurricane prone areas, and the other is a way to make sure two different labs can test the window for impact resistance and get the same result) for decking in Wildland-Urban Interface areas in new construction in California. But it doesn't have classes - it's pass/fail. Either you meet the the minimum requirement or you don't, and in fact a lot of decking that does meet it is ASTM E84 Class C. Here's an excerpt from a paper on this subject written by one of UL's top engineers:

There is no correlation between Steiner Tunnel FSI ratings and effective PHRR as measured by the Under Deck test.
• Class A Steiner Tunnel FSI rating does not guarantee California WUIBS fire compliance.
• California WUIBS fire compliant deck boards may exhibit a Class C Steiner Tunnel FSI rating.

So what is Class A? Well, there are Class A motor homes (a real big one), there's Class A office space (real nice, maybe too nice), and Class A driver's licenses (you can drive the big rigs), and of course Class A jerks (although, jerks are more commonly classified by number - first-class jerk, for example). But there isn't Class A decking.

It's a Category Not a Material!

A recent article in Prosales Magazine extols the virtues of PVC Decking. But what the editors miss is that the category is really ultra-low maintenance decking, not PVC decking. Sure, homeowners are asking for high performance decking - it doesn't mean that it has to be made of PVC Vinyl. PVC Vinyl is perceived as the gold standard in exterior low maintenance, and it has a good reputation for cleanability from vinyl siding. But it's not necessarily the best material for decking, with its low tolerance for heat and susceptibility to stains from sunscreen and bug spray. And ironically PVC Vinyl decking is also susceptible to attack from its flexible vinyl cousins, including items that are commonly found on decks such as garden hoses, doormats and swimming pool covers. CorrectDeck CX is a hybrid of PVC-like performance and composite-like sustainability decking that doesn't use any PVC Vinyl and doesn't have exposed wood fiber. Thus it doesn't have the same issues with attack from flexible vinyl or sunscreen like PVC, or fading, grease and mildew like gen-1 composite decking. But with its recycled composite core, it retains the sustainability benefits of the composites.

Filtered Sunlight

It seems like things are slowly coming back to normal levels of business (our business cratered with the September banking meltdown - prior to that, '08 was a good year). Remodelling is driving a lot of activity. Nobody can sell a house, so noone can buy a house, so everyone's 'aging in place'. As life circumstances change, new children are born, kids move out, kids move back and so on, people can't move up to that three bedroom house, so they're looking for more room. Adding a deck is the most economical way to add square footage of living space to get the hell away from the in-laws.