Complete Recovery

"We squeeze the heck out of a building." That is how Richard Lorenz, CEO and owner of Central Environmental Services Inc. (CES), Orlando, Fla., describes his company’s approach to the recovery of materials on its demolition projects.

He is proud of the amount of material his crews can pull out of a building while still meeting deadlines. The fact that the $5 million-per-year company makes it economically viable in an area where 30-cubic-yard roll-offs can be dumped for less than $100 only 15 miles away also shows a commitment to recycling, reuse and the environment.

"Central Environmental Services really believes in protecting the environment. That’s why the middle name of the company is environmental," Lorenz says. But it is also a personal commitment, because "my children are growing up on this Earth, so I do what I can to help."

Some actions CES takes are strictly environmental, such as making sure to remove refrigerant from air conditioning and refrigeration equipment, properly disposing of liquid hazardous waste such as paints and oils and draining hydraulic fluid out of elevators.

Or in the case of the high-profile "Jaymont" project in downtown Orlando, paying to remove vinyl tile flooring ripped off the concrete floors so it can be disposed of properly. "We had a report done that showed the asbestos was not friable, and under current regulations we could have wrecked the tiles along with the whole building," Lorenz says. "But we paid $21,000 to remove it."

That allowed the company to get at the concrete underneath and to send it over to a local recycler for a "free" tipping fee. "You still have to pay for the trucking, so I don’t know how free ‘free’ really is," he adds.

CES certainly got a lot of free—if not always welcome—publicity on the Jaymont project. The buildings, which included 65,000 square feet of retail-type space as well as a four-story office building, covered an entire city block on Church Street in the middle of Orlando’s downtown entertainment district. Two of the buildings were long-shuttered department stores, one a locally owned McCrory’s, the other a Woolworths.

In their heydey 50-odd years ago, the two stores competed vigorously against one another, and many locals remember enjoying pleasant times eating at one or the other’s lunch counters. So, when it was announced that the block with the two buildings was being removed, there was an outcry by many preservationists. When the project started, pictures of the progress of the demolition were featured several days in a row on the front page of the Orlando Sentinel, a daily newspaper.

But such nice memories collided with the current state of the buildings, says Lorenz. An air conditioner had collapsed a roof on one of the buildings, "and I knew the moment I unlocked the door and walked in there, the building was loaded with mold and mildew." Almost all the buildings had some termite damage and had no fire suppression systems, sprinklers or easy exitways in case of fires. All of this Lorenz detailed in a report to the owner of the block so that the company could respond to the public criticism.

The block was being cleared to make way for a $128-million development that will include two residential high-rises, retail space and a movie theater—a true upgrade from the damaged structures.

Despite the poor condition of the buildings, CES was able to pull a lot of metal on the job. For example, the four-story structure had aluminum fins over some upper floor windows to protect against the hot Florida sun. The four-story building was balled in with a crane, then pulled back onto the site where the metal could be removed.

CES prefers to work in groups of three or four operators using the company’s eight excavators to take down a building, Lorenz says. "No movement is made by one man; it is all teamwork and communication," he says. "Just because I am the boss does not mean I make all the decisions. I get with the team to make a decision. That is why we stay injury-free."

At Jaymont, the metals were pulled out and the wood carefully removed. The scrap yards "pay us for metal, not 2-by-4s," says Lorenz. CES had 60 days to clear the block, so time was available to process the metal further into more valuable lengths.

Such an attack on metals might not have happened a few years ago, Lorenz says. "We used to recycle all the metals on our jobs, and then the market got unbearably low. You had to judge just how much time and labor you wanted to spend on things like taking the glass out of aluminum windows." But metal markets have really come back in the past year, he says.

The equipment CES uses includes a Komatsu 400 excavator with a grapple, densifier, shear and 6,000-pound hammer for attachments. The rest are smaller Caterpillar machines, all with thumb buckets and grapples.

"Sometimes on the smaller Cats, the thumbs work a lot better than a grapple," Lorenz says. "On the larger jobs, a grapple works well because it helps bend up rebar. Thumbs are good for loading; you can really get a good mouthful with them." But he says most operators are so good with the tracked excavators that they can pick up 1/2-inch copper pipe out of a huge pile of debris. "It’s amazing," he says.

Lorenz readily admits that, like most other contractors, it can be difficult for CES to get good operators. "It’s a tough job," he notes. "It’s gritty, dirty and takes stamina and high concentration so you don’t get yourself hurt. If you are really up-close with a four-story building, stretched and pulling it down, a piece of ‘hard rain’ may come down and hit the boom or something," he says. "It takes someone special to be able to handle that strain."

For that reason, Lorenz believes it pays to keep the best employees happy. One of his ways of doing it is to provide health care coverage for his best people "so they can take care of their families."

But like in other industries, the cost of providing that insurance has gone up dramatically. Indeed, Lorenz, who is chairman of the Insurance Committee of the National Association of Demolition Contractors (NADC), says insurance is the number one problem facing the demolition industry today. "Our own insurance has gone up 55 percent in the past 18 months, liability insurance is up 50 percent, and truck insurance is up even more than that," he comments.

Yet CES has had minimal claims in that time, he says. Lorenz feels the insurance companies lost a lot of money from the 9/11 attacks, and "I think they’re trying to recoup it through insurance to contractors and other businesses. That is why rates have gone up, not because of [claims] in our industry."

He also thinks it has been a way for small-time contractors to get a foothold in the demolition business. "Other little contractors coming in don’t have the type of insurance that we do, so it is not a level playing field. That needs to be addressed."

He thinks states might need to license demolition contractors, to show they have some experience in the field. In Florida, he says, only the general contractors are state licensed.

Of course, at one time Lorenz was a smaller contractor, although that was a long time ago when he was a teenager growing up in Illinois. He started out wrecking garages by hand for a garage builder when he was 15 years old. By the time he was 16, he had made enough to buy a new pickup truck.

The business is a lot different now, he says. Speed can be of the utmost importance for demolition contractors. For example, Publix, a regional grocery chain, wanted an 80,000-square-foot building wrecked and gone in two weeks because the company had to have the deli counter serving salami in 90 days. Lorenz is proud of the fact his company has successfully met those deadlines, to the point where Publix has used CES for seven of its jobs.

CES sister company Orlando Liquidators Inc. is involved in the sale of salvaged material. The company’s www.orlandoliquidators.com  Web site lists the availability of materials ranging from chandeliers to wood beams. Also, it has a database of buyers and sellers of certain products and notifies them when an item they might be interested in is available. CES has also used eBay, the online auction site, to sell some of the higher end products it salvages.

Yet Lorenz is adamant that recycling and reuse need to be an option based on economic viability. "Nobody should expect anybody to do it for free," he says.

The author is associate publisher of Construction & Demolition Recycling and executive director of the Construction Materials Recycling Association. He can be contacted at turley@cdrecycling.org.