Happy Harry is momentarily horrified. Harry hates rats, and I have just seen an eight-inch rat scuttle out of an old lunch bag. "Ya had to see a rat," he says, his voice muffled as his backside disappears through a broken door panel, our only access to a dilapidated five-storey building soon to be demolished. Once a part of Winnipeg's busy rag trade and only a few hundred yards from Portage and Main, the building now has its doors chained shut, its windows look like empty eye sockets, and the foundation has slumped enough on one side to make historical preservation out of the question. Boarding surrounds the doomed structure like the curtain they pull around a lame racehorse before shooting it.

Harry and I are trespassing so that he can make a point. "Look at these beams!" he says, indicating a massive square-cut column of Douglas fir that stands in shafts of light and dust like a faceless totem pole. "That will be taken for sure. And look up there. Look at those two-by-sixes! Every floor is solid two-by-sixes laminated side by side. It's incredible! Come on upstairs."

The second floor is like all the others, dim and dirty and derelict and empty but for chunks of abandoned machinery and some broken worktables where Ukrainian housewives must have stitched a million buttonholes. To me, it looks skeletal. To Harry, it's gold. "Look. Look at this!" He pulls up a floorboard, buckled by the wonky foundation. "This is solid maple. Run it through a planer, and it's perfect. There's 50,000 square feet of this stuff here. I could sell this stuff for a year."

Harry is Harry Bohna, an ardent Winnipegger from St. Boniface and the proprietor, along with his wife Carol, of Happy Harry's Used Building Materials, a jerry-built collection of storage sheds in a muddy industrial yard on the city's eastern edge. The sheds are brimming with construction detritus: used plywood still studded with nails, used windows and doors of varying sizes and states of imperfection, used kitchen cabinets standing like lost souls amid a riot of old pastel sinks and toilets, even a used garage that was plucked whole from its footings. Yours for $500. Delivered.

A short, rotund man with a passion for self-promotion, Harry talks rapidly and insistently about the second coming of the salvage trade, his trade. "This is not a fad. This is the trend of things to come. This is recycling."

Harry is not alone in his crusade. Over the past couple of years, used-building-material outlets have appeared in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Waterloo, Guelph, Toronto and Ottawa. One is about to appear in Halifax. They are not pretty to look at -- sort of like orderly dump sites or homes for wayward windows and doors. And people looking for elegant or unmarked items can assuredly stay away. But the sentiment is correct. "Don't forget," says Harry like a stuck record, "the theme here is recycling!"

Salvagers have been around forever. Maybe even before forever. The act of creatively gleaning from other people's waste must surely be prehistoric. In this century, "rag-and-bone men" trundled through most big cities on their horse-drawn carts, collecting bits of glass and cloth and wood they could bundle and sell. In the demolition trade, companies like Teperman's, the Toronto wrecker, have always creamed off the best timber and ironwork and stone from old buildings they tear down. And in any poor country, you would only have to pass around the word one afternoon that a building needs demolishing, and by morning, the site would be picked as clean as a carcass on an anthill. But our affluence discourages such picking. Next to the Japanese, North Americans remain the world's most prolific disposers of things still usable. We largely forgot about salvaging in the go-go era between the end of World War II and roughly last year, when, for reasons of environment and economy, the two engines of much change, we began again to look at the things we consume -- including building materials -- in a new light.

Admittedly, the light is still dim. While some industries, such as packaging and paper, are being thoroughly hectored for their environmental failings, others, like construction and demolition, have, for the most part, escaped public scrutiny. Think about it. As we wring our hands over whether to compost that coffee filter or toss it in the trash, approximately one-third of all landfill waste comes from construction and demolition. When a building's life is over, it is normally demolished and carted off to a landfill site. Bricks and beams may be salvaged. But everything else, from light fixtures to floorboards, gets trashed.

"We have been totally wasteful," says Harry, whose business includes stores in both Winnipeg and Calgary. "These are perfectly usable building materials. In Europe -- my parents were from Czechoslovakia -- nothing is thrown out. A car never goes to the wreckers because of rust. It'll be stripped down for parts first. Buildings should be treated the same way."

Harry and Carol launched Happy Harry's in 1989 with a trailer on an open lot. Sales on the first day were $10. In 1993, Harry claims, revenues from his combined operations totalled $1 million. Not bad for junk. "And there are no loans here," he says with pride. "I own everything. This is grass roots, and it pays its way every day, or I work harder."

Happily, the business also tends to walk in off the street. One cold day last April, a well-dressed couple in their 50s entered Harry's "showroom" through the open garage door and began examining a tableful of lighting fixtures. They had never heard of Happy Harry before, but the massive waving Casper the Friendly Ghost lookalike mounted out front like an apparition from an old Christmas float drew them inside. "These are perfect," said the woman. "We found an old wagon wheel in Florida last year, and we've been wanting to make it into a chandelier. These would be $40 each in a lighting store." She bought eight for $5 apiece. Harry bought 1,000 of the fixtures for $1 apiece from a hotel that was being renovated. The woman was thrilled. Harry made $32 on a single transaction. And the environment was spared eight landfilled lamps. "It's a clean, simple business," says Harry as his teenage daughter rings the sale into the till. "I love it."

"This is really no big secret," says Happy Harry, closing the door of the old derelict building behind him and making a quick rat check before jumping from a loading dock onto an old mattress on the ground. "Of course used stuff should get reused. Of course that flooring should become flooring again. This is recycling. This is the trend. This is the right thing to do."