The Business Of Recycling Building...
COMMERCIAL CONSTRUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES generates 3.89 pounds of waste per square foot, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And depending on the project, that number could jump to as much as six pounds per square foot.
Closer to home, the state’s construction industry dumps 1.3 million tons of debris into our landfills each year, according to the May 2003 Wisconsin Waste Characterization Study Final Report. In fact, nearly one-third of all material in Wisconsin’s municipal solid waste landfills comes from construction and demolition debris. While builders and contractors are throwing away a majority of debris from job sites, they are also throwing away a lot of money unnecessarily. Roughly speaking, Wisconsin builders paid about $63 million in 2001 to dispose of construction waste, but there is a way to recycle many of these materials and save money in the process.
WasteCap Wisconsin, a non-profit agency, provides planning assistance, as well as technical and educational assistance to companies wishing to learn more about recycling construction site waste. The organization also monitors, measures, documents and publicizes results of waste management efforts during construction and demolition projects.
“Our mission is as long as it’s good for the environment and good for business, we get involved,” says Susan Buchanan, executive director of WasteCap Wisconsin.
The goal is to keep as many things out of the landfill as possible, says David Shoemaker, director of construction management at Oscar J. Boldt Construction and also a WasteCap board member.
Concrete and asphalt are examples of waste items that can easily be recycled, Shoemaker says.
They are very heavy, bulky materials, and rather than taking them to the landfill, they can be ground up and used for road-base course material.
“So instead of going to a quarry and harvesting gravel from a quarry, you can actually grind up the old concrete or asphalt or scrap concrete block that you might be using for foundations you’re building,” Shoemaker explains. “Typically that kind of material goes to a landfill. But what you can do with it is send it over to a recycler who will grind it up and then send it back out for use in roadways.”
WasteCap has established contacts with markets for a variety of scrap materials, even some of the more unusual ones, such as drywall, Styrofoam and wood. But the agency also takes it one step further by actually managing the waste at the construction site.
“There are many projects that try to divert material from landfills but they try to intercept it right at the landfill, says Charles Larscheid, port and solid waste director with Brown County Solid Waste and another WasteCap board member. “But there it has been mixed with other materials and it’s maybe soiled or broken. So if we can get it managed where it’s being produced Š at the building sources, the construction projects Š it’s a lot easier and more beneficial in recycling that material.”
Environmentally speaking, one construction recycling project WasteCap managed saved 526.6 tons or 6,810 yards of construction waste. That’s the equivalent of 325 trees 12 tons of coal, enough electricity to power a Wisconsin home for eight years and fertilizer for 50 acres of land.
Besides saving environmental resources, cost savings is another huge factor, not only in recycling construction and demolition materials, but in landfill fees.
“One of the big areas we’re saving them is on the tipping fees at the landfill,” Buchanan says. “It typically costs less to recycle than to dispose of material in the landfill, so the savings can be significant.”
For example, two recently completed construction waste projects WasteCap managed showed that disposal costs would have been 45 percent and 7 percent higher without recycling.
Two of the recycling projects WasteCap managed include the Harley-Davidson Product Development Center expansion in Milwaukee, where more than $78,000 in disposal costs were saved, and the West Campus Co-generation Facility for Madison Gas & Electric, where the salvage value, plus avoided disposal costs, resulted in a savings of more than $92,000.
While much of the work WasteCap Wisconsin does is related to commercial construction and demolition sites, residential projects can also benefit from recycling.
Russ Ellenbecker, owner of construction Waste Management in Hortonville, is working with WasteCap to assist on residential sites.
“He has bought a packing machine that he is using to grind scrap drywall from residential homebuilding sites,” explains Buchanan.
But using the WasteCap blue print for commercial sites, Ellenbecker has started a sorting for line residential sites. He has set it up so anything that would ordinarily go into a dumpster such as cardboard, wood, metal, roofing shingles, concrete and the like gets sorted and markets are then found for those materials.
“Basically anything that is biodegradable and not harmful to the environment I want to reuse.” Ellenbecker says. “And I am trying to educate the construction managers about the benefits of doing this on site rather than at the landfill. I can make a difference to the environment and probably save them a buck or two in the process.”