Cherry Opens C&D Recycling Facility in Texas

Cherry, a Houston-based recycling and demolition company, has opened a new facility in Hitchcock, Texas. With the newest plant, Cherry now has four recycling facilities in Texas.

The new facility, located on 14 acres, is accepting concrete, asphalt and residential composition asphalt shingles for recycling. Cherry’s Hitchcock Recycling Center also pays for concrete. At the present time the company will not be taking in any wood. “It is not cost-effective to recycle wood,” says Leonard Cherry, president of Cherry. However, he says that if the dynamics change, the company could start accepting wood.

The new facility will have primary and secondary screens, a pug mill as well as some peripheral equipment to help process the material.

Cherry says that the new facility will service the Galveston County area around Houston.

The raw product feed that will be delivered to the new facility will come from Cherry’s demolition jobs, rolloffs and the company’s other operations in the Houston area.

Cherry also has applied to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) for a permit to accept and recycle used tires at the new recycling center. Until the permit is approved, Cherry will only collect tires at the new facility and ship them to the company’s Houston recycling center for processing.

Cherry acknowledges that handling tires is a fairly new product for Cherry. “Tires, RAP (Recycled Asphalt Product) and RAS (Recycled Asphalt Shingles) are materials we have added in the past two years. For us, growth is driven by either geographic expansion or new product lines. We have to think outside the box.”

Hitchcock is Cherry’s second largest recycling facility and can produce 600 tons of Texas Department of Transportation Flex/Base concrete, 400 tons of 3 X 5-inch concrete and 1,000 tons of 1 ¾-inch asphalt daily. With the addition of Hitchcock, the combined daily production of Cherry’s recycling centers is 5,000 tons of TexDot Flex/Base, 1,500 tons of 3 X 5-inch concrete and 5,000 tons of 1 ¾-inch-asphalt.

“Recycling in Hitchcock helps us better serve our customers by bringing a recycling center closer to them,” says Cherry. “Overall, recycling preserves the natural environment by reducing the amount of concrete, asphalt, residential composition asphalt shingles and tires that are dumped in landfills. Then, when contractors use recycled materials in new construction, this reduces the amount of virgin materials that must be mined.”

Cherry, founded in 1952, specializes in the removal of all types of structures through demolition and other deconstruction techniques.