One Man’s Trash ... (check out the slide show too)

Right. You can train a person to put 2x4's together to frame a house fairly easily (it's not hard).

Teaching someone to collate nonstandard bits into a structurally sound building would be much harder. The base problem therefore is that while yes he's reusing goods, the houses are only cheap because he values his time so little.

Looking at the slideshow, I would say this man is much less an entrepreneur, and much more an artist. He is taking discarded, un-appreciated things, and transforming them and arranging them into something beautiful. That the end result is functional housing for low income people enhances the aesthetic value even more, I think. True, this kind of art does not "scale," but with art that is not necessarily the point.

I would also say that much of what he does certainly qualifies as a hack in the sense of ‘an appropriate application of ingenuity.’ And scalable or not, that should certainly be appreciated here.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html

I'll get voted down for this as it's taboo to ask, but what is this obsession with keeping things out of landfills?

It's a myth that there's a shortage of space for landfills. According to the guest on Penn and Teller you need something like 30 square miles to store 10 thousand years of trash for the US at the current rate - sounds like a lot but work out how much space there is in the US.

And it's also a myth that toxic chemicals leech into groundwater. They don't put landfills near groundwater sources, and they put many feet of clay down to stop things leaking through.

I would to see a restaurant do something about that. Much like the man in the article, find thrown goods, dust them off, and put them back into use. Or food.