Anyone who has ever re-roofed a house knows what an incredible mess it makes. Most people hire other people to do this terrible job, there is usually a dumpster involved, and a big pile of asphalt, wood, aluminum and nails heads off to the landfill. In fact, I would be lying if I said that's not what happened when we had the front out our house re-roofed last year. But we all learn from our mistakes, and this time we did the work ourselves, and therefore took care of the aftermath ourselves as well.

The second step was to separate the shingles from the roof boards. We didn't just scrape all the shingles off and then remove decking, instead we cut off chunks of wood and shingles. So we separated the two materials into piles, removing and collecting most of the nails along the way as well (those will head to Calamari in a subsequent trip).

Once we had the shingles separated from the wood, we drove the shingles up to a place in Bloomfield that Nicole found online. This company, Incorporated Industries, LLC, happens to be the only company in Connecticut that recycles asphalt shingles. They grind them up, separate out the nails (we were nice enough to do this for them), and sell the ground up material to companies that mix it in with regular asphalt for paving roads, driveways, etc.
The big pile of wood, which also contains scraps from the framing lumber, will be chipped up in a rented wood chipper and used for mulch.
All of these steps, in addition to re-using the bricks from the chimney we removed as a walkway for the garden, have taken what would otherwise be several loads of landfill material and turned it all into reused material.