Concerned about being environmentally-friendly, sustainability, pollution and landfills, and minimizing your environmental footprint?
This blog post aims to tackle a question that haunts many home and automobile owners: should I get my damaged property repaired, or should I just replace it? And which option is better for the environment?
Eco-Friendly Restorations
Here’s the scenario: you’re a homeowner, and you’ve just installed a brand-new bathtub. It has those fancy faucets you’ve always wanted. It has jacuzzi jets. It’s made of lightweight fiberglass or plastic – not heavy, cumbersome ceramic, like you had before. It’s big, relaxing, and it really ties the bathroom together.
Then, one day, your pre-teen son – bless his rebellious heart – accidentally drops something heavy onto the surface of the tub. The fiberglass is badly cracked in three places and is therefore useless. You can’t use the tub, or the shower, without water leaking through the cracks and into the sub floor – at least not until the bathtub is either repaired or replaced.
So, what variables should you consider when deciding which route to pursue? First, let’s start with the obvious ones:
How much will it cost?
This is usually the first thing that people consider. But let’s think about all the potential costs involved with fully replacing the bathtub that will run up your bill. First and foremost, there’s the cost of a brand-new tub, which doubles your initial investment. You’ll need new caulking, tiling, and grout. There’s the cost of installation and transportation. Then, there’s the cost of disposal. When weighed against the cost of fixing up a few cracks, the cost of replacement is astronomically higher.
How much time will it take?
You need your bathtub. You have kids who need to shower/bathe every day – regardless of whether or not they actually want to. In other words, you need this done fast. You’ll be tempted to simply replace the bathtub. However, in nearly all cases, it’s actually much faster to repair it.
Can it be repaired?
In almost all cases, yes. Absolutely. New Creations specializes in interior repairs, and making old, scuffed-up, or damaged possessions look new again – no matter how damaged they are. Since opening in 1988, New Creations has helped with approximately 2.1 million restorations.
Is it environmentally-friendly?
When addressing the repair vs. replace dilemma, few homeowners and companies consider the potentially disastrous long-term effects of simply replacing every broken or blemished piece of furniture. To replace the bathtub involves tearing out and disposing of all tiling, grout, caulking, and the bathtub itself. This is at least one standard 3 x 6 foot dumpster-full of material – including potentially harmful plastics – that ends up in a landfill.
On a cosmic scale, a dumpster full of material may not sound like much, but consider this: as previously stated, New Creations has helped with 2.1 million repairs and restorations – many of which would’ve have resulted in much more than just one dumpster full of waste. That’s millions and millions of dumpsters of waste kept out of landfills over the past 31 years.
Not only is it timelier and more cost effective to repair – it’s much, much more environmentally-friendly. So while replacing may seem, on the surface, like the easy solution, repairing incurs far fewer costs – both to your wallet and to the ecosystem.
