US Army Corps of Engineers recycles wood and metal during Puerto Rico cleanup

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Washington, is recycling metal and wood chips in its debris removal efforts across the island of Puerto Rico.

Cooperation with the leaders at local municipalities, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and USACE’s Debris Planning and Response Team makes the collection process possible with teams working in nine separate locations. For example, more than 48 trucks have been used to haul 3,700 loads of debris in the city of Ponce.

“We have been actively removing debris from Ponce since Oct. 23,” Jasmine Smith, the debris mission manager from the New Orleans District, says. “We have removed more than 76,000 cubic yards via curbside pickup and temporary disposal sites.”

The estimated total debris in Ponce is projected to be more than 100,000 cubic yards, enough to fill Yankee Stadium more than two feet high.

John Fogarty, debris subject matter expert out of the New Orleans District, says USACE estimates more than 3 million cubic yards of vegetative debris will be generated from Hurricane Maria. About 630,000 cubic yards will be reduced and used for compost, landfill cover and slope protection.

“There is an estimated 1.3 million cubic yards of construction and demolition debris such as lumber and household furniture which will yield approximately 1 million pounds of recyclable metals,” Fogarty says.

Additionally, USACE forecasts that close to 9,000 appliances are part of the debris, which may produce about half a million pounds of metals for recycling. According to Fogarty, USACE is also teaming up with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to handle freon removal from refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners and to coordinate the collection and disposal of household hazardous wastes.

Currently, the Debris Planning and Response Team, in cooperation with FEMA and working closely with leaders of 54 municipalities, has removed 284,000 cubic yards of debris total.

“We continue to make strides with our community partners and endeavor to remove debris in a safe, efficient and environmentally sound manner,” Smith says. “Debris removal continues to be a high priority mission for FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.”

Hurricane Maria landed in Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017.

Michigan contractors face diversion challenges

Kent County, Michigan, officials are looking to move away from using the South Kent Landfill by 2030 and are telling local construction companies to prepare to adjust for a new model of disposal.

The South Kent Landfill is nearing capacity and the Kent County Department of Public Works, Grand Rapids, plans to close the facility. Darwin Baas, executive director of DPW, says the department is developing plans for a 200-acre sustainable business park that will handle and process construction and demolition (C&D) debris and other materials that would normally be landfill bound.

West Michigan’s current recycling rate is around 10 percent. Baas says the sustainable business park will help with the area’s landfill reduction goal of 90 percent by 2030.

A study from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) says more than 49 million cubic yards of waste was landfilled in the state in 2016. Of that 49 million cubic yards, 6.5 million cubic yards was C&D debris. Baas says this number can be higher because the county doesn’t track what types of materials are being brought into the landfill.

For example, Baas says, the DEQ study classified 940,000 cubic yards of waste from Byron Township as municipal and commercial despite a large amount of it coming from construction projects.

Currently, construction companies in West Michigan are struggling to set up multiple receptacles for different materials at job sites. Pioneer Construction Co., a contracting firm based in Grand Rapids, diverts more than 60 percent of debris from landfills. Chris Beckering, executive vice president at Pioneer, says planning efforts on the front end of a building project allow the company to reach its diversion rate.

Britton Industries, a recycling operation founded by Jim Britton, has been furnishing the central New Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania landscaping and construction markets with aggregate products, screened topsoil, mulch and leaf compost for nearly 30 years.

As his fledgling business expanded, Britton accumulated a hodgepodge fleet of equipment. His philosophy at that time was to buy inexpensive, primarily used equipment from various sources to tackle a wide range of projects as needed. But that philosophy has changed.

The hard-nosed businessman scrutinized his now mature business in early 2017. “It’s a volume game,” Britton says of his operation. “We need to weed out the inefficiencies and keep plugging in new efficiencies.”

With fixed material prices and an exceptional team already in place, standardizing the brands, sizes and interchangeability of the equipment at the was the obvious answer.

Britton Industries owns four class B recycling centers: two in Pennsylvania––Morrisville and Philadelphia, and two in New Jersey––Lawrenceville and Marlton.

With more than 100 employees and several hundred pieces of equipment operating across four locations 12-plus hours a day, six days a week, having the right equipment on-site can make a significant difference in operating costs.

“You’re not getting a raise [from] outside,” explains Britton. “It has to come from within.”

Britton has used a countless number of attachment brands and sizes and has owned hundreds of pieces of equipment over the years. Investing in new reliable equipment with planned maintenance contracts and predictable owning and operating costs was the emerging solution, and a carefully orchestrated equipment acquisition strategy was what developed.

STANDARD PROTOCOL

Britton began the standardization process by acquiring 13 Case G Series wheel loaders and four CX250D excavators manufactured by Racine, Wisconsin-based Case Construction Equipment from local dealer Groff Tractor, headquartered in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, to distribute across his yards. He had the excavators fitted with S-Type quick couplers from Oilville, Virginia-based Strickland. The wheel loaders were all fitted with roll-out buckets and couplers from Shippensburg, Pennsylvania-based Volvo.

Britton approached Lumberton, New Jersey-based Ransome Attachments to buy the assortment of Strickland grapples, stump splitters, pulverizers and buckets he wanted. Ransome is also assisting with the replacement of roll-out buckets for the wheel loaders and hammers for the excavators.

The couplers in particular have been a major time saver for Britton. “These couplers allow my operators to switch between implements and jobs in minutes,” he says. “Hit a button, retract the hook, drop the old piece, hook up the new piece, lock it in, test it, and they’re off—usually about two to three minutes total and my guys never get out of the cab.”

The old method, he says, took much longer. “Before with direct-mounted units, we’d need to find an implement that would fit that particular machine, if we had one, and move it to the site, get out of the cab, bang out the pins for the old piece, get in the cab, position the new one, get back out of the cab again to put the pins back in, etc.”

Britton says it could take between 30 to 60 minutes if everything went well and much longer if something went wrong or the equipment “wanted to be difficult that day.”

It also would take a physical toll on the operators, getting in and out of the cab, and the additional resources necessary—needing tools, and often another person to help do the work. “This Strickland system is more efficient in every aspect,” he says.

The first pulverizer from Ransome was delivered in early May 2017 followed by a grapple and wood shear in June. Additional wood shears and grapples were bought in July and September.

“We have plans to add multiple units in the coming months to make each processing site fully self-sufficient with a set of implements—bucket, wood shear, grapple, pulverizer—so we don’t have to move equipment and can focus on our primary job,” says Britton.

The Britton team works at a breakneck pace to maintain production, so the attachments take a heavy beating in this volume-driven environment. Whether that involves breaking a 5-foot hunk of concrete with rebar down to 1 inch or turning an 8-foot-diameter tree stump into mulch, the process must be efficient and cost-effective.

“The abuse these attachments take is extreme,” Britton said. “They [Strickland] have done a really good job with the engineering and durability.”

Britton considers serviceability even more important than the equipment itself and recognizes that every dealer has a different philosophy. Although his relationship with Ransome Attachments is new, he expects it to last. “Honestly, I wish I had been doing business with these guys 20 years ago,” he says.

ADDITIONAL efficiencies

The equipment standardization process has resulted in the hauling of attachments instead of machines between facilities. Britton views this as the beginning of an ongoing quest to further eliminate downtime. His long-term vision involves having a comprehensive spread of Strickland attachments at each location to eliminate transportation altogether.

“You need to be able to nail your process down to the penny and make sure you’re using the same process in every location,” Britton says. “Now we have a standard, and we’re going to expand on it.”

He says his decision to standardize equipment has “vastly improved utilization and efficiency in our processing. In early estimates we believe our equipment utilization has gone from 50 to 90 percent using this standardized system.”

And he says, “It’ll only get better once we have this system fully implemented with a full complement of attachments across all our sites.”

He adds, “No one is going to give us a raise, so we had to find out how to do it ourselves and the best way we’ve found is to be as efficient as possible.”

The article was prepared from a compilation of interviews and content provided by Ransome Attachments, Lumberton, New Jersey, and Case Construction Equipment, Racine, Wisconsin.

The last time Construction & Demolition Recycling (C&DR) published a list of shingles processors in 2015, conditions were ripe for the shingles recycling market.

When oil prices were booming, shingles provided a cost-effective alternative for the petroleum-based binder that makes up about 5 percent of asphalt pavement. But since then, oil prices have lowered and some states are still reluctant to allow it in their mixes. Many shingles processors have struggled to stay in business as a result.

The May/June 2017 C&DR article “Learning to adapt” detailed the struggles of adapting to new end markets due to declining demand of recycled asphalt shingles (RAS).

“The main factor is oil prices, specifically for asphalt cement,” David Stanczak, vice president of sales for Southwind RAS, Bartlett, Illinois, said at the time. “The price of asphalt cement has been cut in half in the last few years, and that lowers the value of recycled asphalt shingles as a whole. Many recyclers are in a situation where they’re stacking up their shingles because they can’t get rid of them when a few years ago, they couldn’t collect them because there was such a large need.”

In the 2015 article accompanying the Shingles Recyclers List, Brian Taylor, editor of Recycling Today, a sister publication to C&DR noted that from 2007 to 2014, the price of oil trended upward and the binder became costly. This caused asphalt producers to look elsewhere. He also cited the rising popularity of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification as a contributor to the use of a sustainable material such as RAS in pavement. Government support, he wrote, also plays a role in the ability to use this recycled material in roads.

In just two years, it appears those three factors are moving toward the opposite end of the spectrum, causing processors to either close completely or stop accepting and processing the material. According to C&DR’s research, 38 out of the 207 processors on the 2015 version of the list have either closed or stopped production.

SEARCHING FOR A REASON

Jim Cotugno, owner of Brice, Ohio-based Green Earth Recycling, had to shut down his operations due to a lack of state mandate and the drop in fuel prices.

In Colorado, Karen Seder, vice president of Asphalt Recovery Specialists, Colorado Springs says that the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) required processors to stop taking in waste shingles effective September 2015.

“The reasoning was that asphalt shingles were not a recyclable product. CDPHE are giving only Asphalt Recovery Specialists Inc. [until] the end of 2017 to prove we have an end-use product,” she says. “Once we do that, they may allow us to intake again.”

Seder says a rumor that further explains the department’s decision was when an asphalt company failed to follow Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) guidelines for using shingles in roadways. The company’s mistake caused the road to fail. “Now CDOT will no longer allow it as a mix,” Seder says. “[But] when you have Texas, Missouri and Minnesota using it in their roadways, it is a recycled product.”

Seder developed a fire-resistant landscaping mulch and fire-resistant cobblestone bricks from recycled asphalt shingles. She says that the way to show CDPHE that Asphalt Recovery Specialists’ products works is by “getting it in the public eye.”

“Marion Acres in Montana and Colorado Springs had two forest fires a couple years ago,” Seder says. “If those homes would have used our landscaping mulch as mitigation around the house, the likelihood of them catching on fire is significantly lowered.”

Asphalt Recovery continues to process shingles with a four-year stock inventory at a rate of 700 tons per month. “We have half a million dollars of equipment and had to lay off eight employees and shut down most of the production to one person that’s producing our end use product,” Seder says.

A CLEANER WAY

Any company using a recycled material in its solution can say that contamination is a risk. For Seder and Asphalt Recovery, contamination was at a minimum because of Seder’s roofing experience, she says. Her company Aspen Roofing Inc.’s website, www.aspenroofs.com, says she and her husband Steven have owned the company since 1993, giving the couple plenty of time to figure out what does and does not belong in a clean pile of shingles. “We know what to look for on the shingles and we know what not to intake,” Seder says.

For other companies, such as RecycleGuy Inc. in Tipton, Indiana, contamination caused a stop in processing.

“So many of the roofers put more wood and plastics in it, and I don’t have anyone to sort through that,” Suzy Edwards, owner of RecycleGuy, says. “It’s been maybe five years since we’ve processed shingles. We’re at the end of our career, we’re 66 [years old] and we’re about out of this business altogether. There’s no use in opening a new market.”

Despite the challenges, in the May/June article, both Cotugno and Stanczak left their conversations saying there may be a light at the end of the tunnel.

“I think, overall, the main recyclers will stay optimistic with the market,” Stanczak said. “They will continue to find new markets. With oil prices being low, there’s just a downturn. There is a cautious optimism because there have been people who have been impacted and because there are people out there who need to look for more markets or alternative markets.”

But with the 2017 Shingles Recyclers List shrinking from 207 in 2015 to 171, , it is clear the industry has more work to do for a full recovery.

The author is assistant editor of Construction & Demolition Recycling and can be contacted at hcrisan@gie.net.

ReWall to double its manufacturing capacity

The ReWall Co., Des Moines, Iowa, has announced it is doubling its manufacturing capacity of roofing products and other construction materials made from recycled food and beverage cartons.

The manufacturer of green building materials says this move is in response to growing demand for its products.

Founded in 2008, ReWall converts cartons into sustainable building materials through its low energy, ecofriendly recycling technology. In July 2017, ReWall installed new equipment to expand the capacity of its manufacturing facility in Des Moines. This increases its need for recycled cartons from about 200 tons to 600 tons per month.

“We have discovered that the unique properties of cartons, such as strength, durability and resistance to mold and moisture, make cartons an ideal material for creating high-quality building materials,” Jan Rayman, CEO of ReWall, says. “With demand growing for our products, our focus is on expansion and identifying additional North American locations for our next facility.”

Sharing a joint interest to increase carton recycling, the Carton Council of North America says it has been a longtime supporter of ReWall with the goal to expand carton recycling nationwide by growing infrastructure for recycling aseptic and gable-top cartons. The Carton Council has worked with ReWall to provide financial and technical support to help expand its end market for used cartons.

The company says the process uses no water, formaldehyde glues or hazardous chemicals. No waste is generated, and every part of the carton is incorporated into the finished products, which include roof cover board, exterior sheathing, wallboard and floor underlayment. The life cycle of the cartons will continue as the building materials also can be recycled, ReWall says.

There are 800 half-pint cartons in each 4-inch-by-8½-inch roof cover board. This means that each truckload of finished ReWall products prevents nearly 600,000 cartons from going to landfills, according to the company.