For years, government officials have pondered how to get rid of Fort Ord's ghost town of old wood buildings.

It seems such a waste: row after row of abandoned structures, intact and yet unfit for civilian use, prey to earthquakes and riddled with asbestos and toxic lead paint. Demolishing them would be expensive and environmentally harmful, considering the amount of landfill that debris from the 1,000 buildings would take up.

But CSU-Monterey Bay officials and a private contractor may have found an alternative: recycling. Their pilot project this month will remove the asbestos and paint from the wood of seven buildings, and then sell the timber on the open market.

It's a project supporters hope will cut removal costs by 30-50 percent, saving the government millions of dollars.

"The whole goal is to reuse a resource instead of just throwing it in the dump," said Chris Pentony, CSUMB's campus construction inspector.

The key player in the project is USA Recovered Resources of Maine. The start-up company has supposedly found a way to strip lead paint off boards in an environmentally friendly manner.

The process sounds simple enough:

Company workers take the buildings apart plank by plank, and contractors remove asbestos from the wood. Then the company inserts the boards into its portable lumber reclaiming facility set up in a lot on the CSUMB campus. The machinery slices off the lead-contaminated sides of the board as special filters collect the specks of lead paint, which then go to a regulation landfill.

What's left is a board that's 25 percent smaller after the process, but it's ready for re-use.

Burying only the lead shavings instead of whole boards is much less expensive and harmful than dumping piles of boards, supporters of the project say.

And the wood that's reclaimed is top-quality Douglas fir and free of knots. It's good enough for flooring, exterior trim or other areas that demand high-quality wood.

"Once it's cleaned up, it looks like the most beautiful trim you've ever seen," Pentony said. "You don't even have to paint it."

As compensation for taking apart the buildings and processing the wood, Recovered Resources will charge the university a fee and keep most of the wood. The company can then sell the wood on the open market.

CSUMB will take about 10 percent of the wood, Pentony said, which it could resell or use in its own construction projects. It might also earn money by leasing Recovered Resources the site of the facility.

Project officials say they're not sure how much money the company will make and how much CSUMB will save. They'll soon find out when they reclaim seven World War II-era buildings as part of an $824,000 pilot project funded by the Army.

It's starting on the first two this week -- former office buildings on the site of the future visitor center at the corner of General Jim Moore Boulevard and Third Street. The other five, which once housed barracks, should be done by April or May.

If the project succeeds, the Army might set up a long-term facility at the university so it can handle the rest of the old Fort Ord buildings, Pentony said.

Recovered Resources President John Stevens said he hopes the process could cut at least $21 million off the estimated $70 million cost of removing all the old Fort Ord buildings.

Success could also prompt the military to use the process at bases nationwide, saving the government billions of dollars, Stevens said.

The company is also trying to work with landfill operators to reclaim their lumber.