Mass. Home Made From Scraps From Big Dig

The home of Paul Pedini and Cristina Perez-Pedini in Lexington, Mass., is shown Tuesday July 18, 2006. The structure is constructed almost entirely of steel and concrete from Boston's Big Dig, utilizing over 600,000 lbs of recycled materials. (AP Photo/William B. Plowman) (William B. Plowman - AP)

The house, built on land that Pedini bought for $410,000, consists of two main living spaces. Up a few steps from the front door is a 1,000-square foot combined kitchen and dining room. A finished basement that doubles as a workout space sits below, and the master bedroom is above it on the top floor.

Looking up in the 800-square-foot great room, featuring a 27-foot ceiling and floor-to-ceiling windows in one corner, Pedini points to three highway slabs that are the underside of his roof. Numbers scrawled on the concrete indicate where the slabs once sat as part of a temporary highway.

Pedini's wife, Cristina Perez-Pedini, also a civil engineer, designed the system that captures rain water for reuse on the garden atop the two-car garage. The couple moved in six months ago, after about 18 months of construction.

Pedini, Hong and Park hope the home is only a beginning. Under an idea Pedini calls "engineered precycling," they want a percentage of government-funded transportation construction contracts to require precycling.

But it may not fly in tradition-laced Massachusetts, where such projects have been hard sells.

Pedini had hoped to use Big Dig scraps to build a 24-unit apartment building on Modern Continental-owned property in North Cambridge. But residents and civic groups objected to the design. The City of Newton also said no to a boathouse proposed to be made with Big Dig leftovers.

The team hopes the state of Washington will show more interest. Officials are in the planning stages of a multibillion-dollar highway project in Seattle, replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Pedini informally discussed it with the Washington Department of Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald. Washington Project Director Ron Paananen sounded less optimistic, noting that most contracts give construction firms ownership of the materials.

Meanwhile, Pedini, now vice president for another major construction firm, Jay Cashman Inc., has spun off an affiliate company, ICON, to pursue his "precycling" goals. In addition to Seattle, Pedini hopes to sell the idea to federal transportation officials.

"Our goal is to get federal funding for a program like that, prove that it can be done, and then once we do it, try to standardize it so it becomes a rote portion for every megaproject thereafter," he said.

And they aren't done with the Big Dig, either. Hong and Park have drawn up plans for a Cashman headquarters. It would be a 30,000-square foot building using Big Dig beams and highway slabs, which they'd have to buy and transport from the storage yard.

"We're looking for an over-the-top effect," Pedini adds.