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• C&D Recycling Some Best Practices

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Photo: Sennebogen

In good times or bad, the trash still flows, doesn’t it? But in the case of wreckage from the depressed construction and demolition (C&D) sector, the flows now trickle, and recyclers are adjusting to radical business and operational challenges.

Housing is, of course, in deep recession, and in nonhousing construction the downturn is hardly less steep. Regarding the latter, last year’s forecasts from the American Institute of Architects were hastily revised downward to reflect a precipitous net decline for 2008, with the expectation that nonhousing work will tumble another 6.7% by the end of 2009.

Whatever its total volume, though, the nature of C&D wreckage remains “basically the same debris as always,” says Krause Manufacturing’s Wade Koning in Bellingham, WA. Though there’s less of it coming in, the dumpsters typically collect an assortment of dirt, brick, concrete, asphalt aggregates, loose dimensional lumber, shake shingles, other roofing materials, metals, cardboard, drywall gypsum board, sheet rock, yard trimmings, and “miscellaneous” (i.e., anything else tossed in).

Items wind up at recycling centers for separation and recovery, after which the sorted items are shunted into bays or rolloffs.

Recycling operators focus, naturally, on what markets want to buy: Prioritized are wood, concrete, brick, asphalt, metals, cardboard, and plastics. But the degree of the effort expended these days fluctuates wildly, being “highly dependent on markets and prices,” says Koning, “and it varies greatly by location.” Koning is marketing manager for Krause, an equipment maker supplying markets nationwide.

Actually, too, he points out, waste from construction and demolition represents two very different mixes and niches, derived from opposite ends of the building life cycle, so to speak. Construction trash often makes very light and easy loads consisting of empty packaging, boxes, and shrink-wrap. But after the building is torn down, tons of brick, metal, concrete, and other weighty wreckage rolls in. And it’s typically more challenging to handle in every way. Again, the specific composition of demolition waste varies by locale and demographics.

Typically, handling this waste requires specialized, heavy-duty equipment. Dan McAuliffe, president of United Recycling Co. in Seattle, advises that “You’ve got to have right tires and right grapples” to process demolition debris. “Otherwise, maintenance costs go right through the roof.” His firm primarily uses balers and grinders as key equipment, he adds.

Other typical pieces, broadly, include conveyors, assorted kinds screens to separate by size, magnets, air jets, wet separators, and optical sensing equipment, notes Koning. To reduce incoming scrap sizes and save on volume, shredders and grinders are generally de rigeur.

Business Bust Balancing Acts
As noted, priorities and strategies for processing are driven by markets. And these, we know, are in the pits. Tim Wenger, president of the Sabetha, KS–based CW Mill Equipment Co. Inc., sums it up: “We’re all in a doom-and-gloom mode right now.”

Photo: Krause Manufacturing Rotating trommels can be essential when sorting wastes.

“The diesel fuel thing really hurt us last summer,” he goes on. His typical equipment buyers easily spend a half-million dollars a year on this fuel. Suddenly and unexpectedly tacking-on another $200,000 or $300,000 in costs “wiped ’em out, profit-wise” in 2008, he says. “When business is rocking and rolling, you can absorb it. But business was slowing down. That made it much worse. If anyone thought they were going to make a profit last year, the oil companies got their hands in that pocket first.”

A mulch producer in New Jersey who uses Wenger’s flagship product, the Hogzilla monster grinder, spent $300,000 more than planned last year. “Now they’re looking at converting to electric power,” Wenger says.

This is not at all unusual. A number of inquires have come in. “We’re now trying to stay business with an electric grinder,” Wenger says.

In Seattle, McAuliffe found that the once-robust market for scrap iron “began fluctuating up and down” before ending way down. “That has changed the ways people do business,” he says.

The same occurred with scrap plastic and cardboard. “China shut down 90% of toy factories, and that, in turn, is slowing outgoing plastic way down.”

Compounding the pain of shrinking markets is the fact that tipping fees have occasionally risen, as several recyclers reported.

“In some landfills,” notes Todd Gruss of Morbark Inc. in Winn, MI, “they will no longer accept C&D waste or any other that can’t be identified.” So trucks are being turned away. Morbark makes large wood grinders for domestic sale and export.

In California, an added curve was thrown at waste managers on January 1, 2009, when a regulatory tweak of the “diversion formula” took effect on total allowable landfill tonnage. It’s now capped at 6.5 pounds per person and may not be increased per capita year-to-year, reports Doug Button, president of South San Francisco Scavengers.

This rule has basically had a desired effect, he says, in spurring C&D recycling, because waste processors must meet the higher recycling quota any way they can.

However, the law doesn’t guarantee that the increase will be commensurately compensated or even profitable. In one example of the impact, Button points out, the recycling of asbestos-laced shingles or other potential Hazmat construction materials is becoming prohibitively problematic, for a combination of health, safety and liability reasons. During the construction bubble, the asbestos issue wasn’t so bad, because certain builders would take back intact asbestos shingles. “But no longer,” he says—there’s no demand. And no allowable way to dispose of this waste. What to do?

“It’s a squeeze,” he acknowledges, in which the separation and recycling must be done, even if output material is unwanted. “And there is no real remedy.”

Regionwide, “All markets except wood are falling apart,” he says.

This means doing everything possible to boost overall processing efficiency and save costs.

Wood Doing Good; Calcium Etching a Niche
As Button and others mentioned, wood does indeed remain one of several bright spots.

Clean, untreated leftovers from construction sites will find plenty of ready buyers for use as fuel, biomass, or mulch, reports Cory Gross, regional sales manager for chipper machine manufacturer Bandit Industries Inc. in Remus, MI.

Unfortunately, though demand for cheap fuel is good, supply is down to a trickle. So, this has the effect of it being a bit of a nonmarket anyway. In any case, Wenger says, “Customers … can’t get their hands on enough.”

As for wood from demolition sites: After a structure succumbs to the wrecking ball, dirty lumber—typically treated or painted—is rendered useless, as its contaminants mean it cannot be burned safely.

Photo: Bandit Industries Demand for wood mulch is surprisingly strong.

Photo: Krause Manufacturing The right equipment can help keep the line moving nonstop.

In Tallahassee, for one, Kim William’s business of grinding and colorizing quality woodwaste has been, of late, “wonderful,” he says.

Beginning, typically, with a dumpster of dimensional construction lumber (e.g., two-by-four cuts and busted-up pallets), mechanical processing first shreds it all then uses magnets to grab the nails or other metals.

To facilitate all this, “One of the neatest things I did was buy a Morbark Predator slow-speed shredder,” says Williams, president of Marpan Recycling.

Next, the metal-free wood slivers are size-filtered through a circular, rotating trommell. “It pops from there onto an apron conveyor, where we hand-quality-control any trash that’s left.”

The filter passes three-eighths-inch material through it, and even this can be collected, bagged, and sold as potting soil.

The larger chunks continue into a vertical mill. This is equipped with a 2-inch-diameter colorizing manifold that hammers the wood with quarter-inch holes; hammers disperse and press a selected color dye into the wood. “It just makes the most beautiful mulch balls,” Williams says, giving credit to the manufacturers, “with no additional energy cost involved.”

Though colored, it comes out dry enough to start bagging it right away, and the market is still good; but if it goes sour, Williams can perform quick retooling to crank out perfectly sized boiler-fuel pellets instead. There’s even an export market for this product, he says.

Justin Karr, owner of Quality Soil Amendments in Bakersfield, CA, also enjoys a fruitful recycling trade—not with wood but with another interior material: He’s transforming crushed gypsum-based drywall into valuable calcium, creating a niche all to himself as the only certified recycler of it in the state.

Who, you wonder, wants gypsum or its calcium? After all, it’s spurned by landfills because it eats through the clay liners.

But, for the same reason, farmers up and down the San Joaquin Valley swear by it, because gypsum etches the otherwise semipermeable clay or silt, enabling aeration and hydration. Just plow in some of Karr’s “amendments,” and the dense earth succumbs to porous fissures and marbling. Good irrigation and a rich harvest pay back the investment many times over.

As for processing the incoming drywall chunks, says Karr, the trick is first to clean the sheetrock very well, then feed it into a high-speed grinder (Karr’s model is a Doppstadt). This munches it down to powder. Then, use screens to cull the metals and contaminants. The gypsum powder comes out consistently clean this way, he reports, and, cost-wise, calcium is much cheaper from local recycling than it is when quarried and trucked from afar.

In Concrete Terms, a Cash Cow
David Ferguson, senior project estimator at Recycled Materials Co. in Arvada, CO, concedes that “The whole construction industry is in a slump, and we still feel the effects.” Even so, RMC is enjoying prosperity in at least one sector, thanks to the highly diversified market it is finding for precision-crushed concrete.

And, as the Obama administration begins to pump out multibillion-dollar make-work infrastructure projects—bridges, roads, waterworks—this juice should kick the “aggregates” market, as it’s called, into warp drive.

The trick to getting truly high-profit concrete recycling, says Ferguson, is to devise a way to do it onsite. Instead of wrecking a structure, then having to load, long-haul, and dump it far afield—and get little profit for it—imagine the money to be made if you could simply set up a sort of roadside retail stand, right at the site, and get thousands of dollars per truckload of what is seemingly worthless rubble.

Conceptually, it’s not quite that simple, but almost.

Big structures, whether toppled by controlled demolition or a wrecking ball, yield enormous waste tonnage. Hauling it, whether to a landfill or processing plant, is enormously costly. The zeros pile up quickly.

Ferguson illustrates: “If I’ve got to spend 60 bucks a ton to dump this—when I could come onsite and stack it for a fraction of the cost, then turn around and sell it—it has such a financial viability that it’s almost ludicrous to haul it off to a landfill.”

Applying the integrated prowess of an assortment of mobile, rail-borne equipment—impactors, jaws, crushers, and cones—a pile of wrecked building ensues. Mounds are then sorted and further reduced into a valuable recycled product. “Specialized pieces of equipment will, in essence, remove all the natural aggregates that were put in all the concrete to begin with,” Ferguson explains. “And those still have a market value.”

Steel rebar, he continues, is easily ripped right out of concrete. “And the financials on this are astounding,” he says. “At $400 to $500 bucks a ton, you’d be a fool not to recycle. And you are seeing six- and seven-figure checks.”

Even in a collapsed global construction market, the easily recovered steel extraction makes sense: “Just sit on it as an investment, wait for the right timing, and sell it,” he says.

However, the concrete element takes a little more forethought. If a rock quarry sits down the road, you probably won’t win competitive bids. But if, as is more often the case, competitors are miles away, their haul distances will kill them, compared to yours. Recycled aggregates, within a certain circumference, look very good.

“Even in the worst case,” he says, “the cost of producing aggregate from recycled concrete might be just 10 dollars a ton.”

And your refined rubble from a smoking ruin is often in proximity to some pending job site or other.

Even if it isn’t, other markets seem to be sprouting.

Stones walls can be formed and built from it.

One shopping mall packed it into 5-foot-thick foundation bed.

Buildings certified green by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design will earn prize points for using it.

One engineer came by one day, wanting to form rectangular slabs of it into park benches.

The Colorado Department of Transportation approved it as a road material. Once that happened, Ferguson recalls, “We were off and running. You can just add water to it, set it up, and turn it into a classic road base… That’s our biggest cash cow.”

Screening it to three-eights of an inch fine makes a commercially acceptable structural fill.

On the firm’s biggest job yet, RMC was asked to crunch the numbers for a bid to tear up and haul off aging runways at Stapleton Airport. RMC came back with an offer to do it for[nothing—just to get their hands on the tons of prize rock. “It sold like hotcakes,” he says, including a single $2 million contract for mounds to cap contaminated waste sites.

Stapleton ultimately turned out to be “the largest recycling project so far on the planet,” he says with some pride.

“Our goal is never go to landfill. And we’re just at the tip of the iceberg.”

Real optimism is obviously not lacking, then—and neither is opportunity.

As for recovery prospect more broadly, Doug Button speaks hopefully for the industry, perhaps with justification: “All these market will come back eventually,” he says. “So, we’re in it for the long haul.”