Pulling it all together

As landfill capacity constraints and rising trucking costs continue to affect solid waste operations on the East Coast, efficiently transporting waste has become increasingly important.

With foresight into the challenges that would face the transportation and waste industries, Hainesport Transportation Group (HTG) founders Darryl Caplan, Todd Sage and Ron Bridges came together roughly 20 years ago to establish a company focused on the connection between the two industries.

Each founder brought his unique background in waste transport logistics and an understanding of how the industry was “evolving,” says Patrick Dauria, vice president and general manager of waste services at HTG.

“Looking 15, 20 years down the road—which is where we are now—with their knowledge and [an understanding of] the industries they were involved in, [they saw] rail was extremely beneficial in the movement of waste and, at the time, was not really being utilized,” he says. “So, that’s really how the company got started—on the rail side.”

The company, based in Hainesport, New Jersey, has since grown through acquisition to offer a complete lineup of disposal, transport and recycling solutions for customers.

Today, HTG has six lines of business: Champion Disposal, a residential, commercial and construction container service provider; the Creekside Landfill, a construction and demolition (C&D) landfill in Toledo, Ohio; Hainesport Secondary Railroad, a federally charted short line railroad; Hainesport Transfer, a C&D transfer station in Hainesport; R&B Debris, a C&D recycling company and logistics service provider for hazardous and nonhazardous waste, also in Hainesport; and Technical Rail Services, an intermodal transload facility served by CSX railroad.

“We have multiple assets. [We have] rail; we have roll-off trucks; we have rail cars; we have landfill [capacity]; we have intermodal containers removing waste on various types of rail cars—flat cars [and] gondola cars,” Dauria explains. “Multiple types of equipment and [transportation vessels] all play a very key role in the logistics of waste moving, but all play very different roles for each individual subsidiary of the company.”

Reaping rail benefits

HTG’s rail assets, which now serve as a foundation for the company’s other operations, have become a key component to efficiently transport waste—just as the founders of the company anticipated.

In addition to shrinking landfill space, Dauria says the truck driver shortage has made it difficult for waste companies looking to transport materials further distances or even out of state.

“[The founders] saw the increased rate for transportation. They saw the driver pool shortage coming, which, taking COVID out of the picture, there’s been a shortage of drivers for the last few years,” he says, adding that as companies such as Amazon and Walmart have created more job opportunities, they have reduced the pool of drivers available. “A lot of them are moving over to that type of transportation role, and garbage truck drivers [and] roll-off drivers are harder to find. They saw this 20 years ago and knew that this was going to be coming, and they’ve built the foundation and the infrastructure for the company around that.”

While HTG’s rail assets have proven beneficial, Dauria says that side of the business also comes with its own challenges.

“There’s a lot of moving parts when it comes to rail. It can be a very expensive business to be in, and there’s certain things that you can control and certain things you cannot control,” he says. “If you look at rail compared to trucks, well, first of all, you don’t own the tracks. … When you’re controlling the transportation with your own trucks, you can be hands-on and you can make a move. If a truck is going to location ‘A’ and you need it to go to location ‘B,’ through our dispatch group, we can change the direction of that truck. We cannot control a train; we cannot control the railroad or the multiple railroads that we have to work with.”

The nature of transporting waste by rail means that Dauria says HTG prioritizes communication throughout the process.

“[The] No. 1 [priority] is communication—communication with our yard, our receiving yard, with the rail yard, with every rail interchange point between point A and point B ... The second thing … is assets; you have to have enough assets,” he says. “If rail assets get held up, you can’t just stop the operation. You have to be able to continue the operation with additional assets.”

Having a significant fleet of rail cars also helps pull trucks off the road, says Jillian Eberly, director of rail development for HTG.

“You can put 100 tons in a rail car; that’s about four truckloads,” she says. “So, there’s four trucks off the road.”

In doing so, this reduces greenhouse gas emissions as well as congestion on roads, Dauria adds.

Keeping things moving

To manage HTG’s vast fleet of material transfer assets, Dauria says the company relies on strict operating procedures and dedicated maintenance schedules for equipment.

“We have operating procedures that we put in place for all of our drivers and all of our operation crews, and, if we stick by those … and we communicate, we’re able to maintain, fabricate, purchase, repair [and] stay on top of preventive maintenance for all of our equipment,” he says. “It takes a mountainous team to do it, but at the end of the day, without the equipment, you can’t [provide] service; you can’t do what you set out to do.”

Dauria says the maintenance team, fabrication shop and other operational team members are indispensable.

“We make sure it’s safe for the drivers and for the public and [that] we can transfer the waste from point A to point B efficiently and safely,” he says.

Typical wear and tear from large, heavy pieces of C&D debris are some of the most common maintenance-related issues when it comes to HTG’s equipment, Dauria says. This is especially true with roll-offs and walking floor trailers, where large pieces of debris are compacted to maximize space in the vessel.

“When you’re putting all that material into a container, whether it be a walking floor, roll-off or gondola, it’s a lot of wear and tear on that [vessel], and that’s why we have a full fabrication shop here to be able to … repair it [and] to do inspections daily,” he explains.

Eberly says railroad personnel also help to identify cars that need repairs. Railroads often will “sidetrack” cars at a rail yard for new brakes, ladders and other maintenance needs which, left unaddressed, would be unsafe, she says.

“[The cars] are really … being maintained from every aspect, from the origin, people unloading it [and] the railroad, so really threefold,” Eberly adds.

Because its owns its rail cars and waste facilities, HTG also has the added benefit of a team on the ground throughout a trip to catch any equipment problems.

Shrinking the stream

Given the hefty capital and asset management needed for long-haul waste transport, Dauria says the company is careful about the economics when it decides between using trucks or trains to transport material.

There’s a set distance at which it makes more sense to transport by rail than by truck, but the size of the load and distance are not the only variables at play, he says.

“There are a lot of variables that go into that, but now we’re being faced with not just the cost aspect [but] the supply—the trucker pool,” he says “It might be cheaper, and it might be more efficient to move waste by truck from the Northeast to western Pennsylvania, but we can’t get the driver pool to handle the quantity of waste that needs to be moved, so that option really goes by the wayside.”

To help lower the burden on landfill capacity and waste transport, HTG is making it a point to divert and recycle as much of its C&D material stream as possible through R&B Debris.

“Landfill space is going away. … If waste can be diverted outside of a landfill and beneficially reused, that’s what we need to be focused on. And it’s happening in the C&D industry. It’s happening with MSW [municipal solid waste]; it’s happening with biosolids; it’s happening in every single industry—the plastics market, soil remediation—it’s not just C&D, Dauria says.

The author is associate editor of Construction & Demolition Recycling and can be reached at hrischar@gie.net.