Source: Saint Paul Pioneer Press (MN), December 29, 2012
Posted on: http://envfpn.advisen.com
Chuck Alvord’s job used to be so simple.
Smash. Remove. Repeat.
But today, Alvord and others in the demolition business don’t destroy buildings as much as recycle them — and saving about 70 percent of what they find.
“When I started, we’d just take it all to the landfill,” said Alvord, the site superintendent for the demolition of a library in Minneapolis. Now, his buildings are carefully taken apart to separate the concrete, metals, wood, shingles and lights.
Buildings have become the surprising star of the recycling movement.
The 70 percent average of materials recycled is more than twice the recycling rate for cans, bottles, paper and plastic, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The demolition recycling rate has shot up in the past decade and now exceeds the weight of recycled materials from consumer sources.
“We do it because it’s good for the environment, and it’s good PR,” said Mike Taylor, director of the National Demolition Association. “And you can make billions of dollars doing it.”
The surge in building recycling has gone largely unnoticed, said Bill Turley, director of the Construction Materials Recycling Association.
“When you tear up a highway or take down a shopping center, the general public doesn’t realize how much goes into landfills,” Turley said.
Heavy demolition adds hundreds of millions of tons to the amount of recycled materials nationwide. But recycling of bottles and cans gets most of the attention because “that’s where the votes are,” said Turley.
“I call cans and bottles a cute little waste stream.”
New products are more likely to come from recycled buildings than from the green bins on suburban driveways, said the Demolition Association’s Taylor. “The car you are driving, the refrigerator in your house, they were once part of a building,” he said.
The spike in demolition recycling is happening because it’s become profitable.
Fees for waste hauling — and the discounts for
recycling — have reached a tipping point.
In St. Paul, a container of normal debris would cost $400 to be hauled away, while the same container of recycled material costs $200, said Mike Holmes, vice president of Century Construction Co. Inc. of South St. Paul.
He said recycling is now required by about two-thirds of the owners of buildings being demolished.
“It is a material stream, not a waste stream,” he said. “Everything has value.”
Demolition recycling has also increased because new markets have developed, so recyclers can find buyers for their recyclables.
“Now, every demolition contractor knows the value of every commodity on every project. He has to, to be competitive,” said Taylor.
Recycling can give builders an edge in gaining LEED certification.
The certification, managed by the U.S. Green Building Council, proves that a builder is using “green” techniques. Recycling materials can give a builder points toward that certification.
“Architects and engineers and general contractors are all thinking about this now,” said Mark Ryan, president of the salvage company Carl Bolander & Sons Co. of St. Paul.
The changes have clobbered old-school demolition companies like a wrecking ball hitting an office building.
Virtually overnight, they have recycled themselves into new companies.
Dem-Con Cos. operated a landfill in Shakopee in 2002, with no recycling program. But it has morphed into a recycling company that last year recycled 100,000
tons of material, not including concrete diverted to another recycling company.
“It is something we are proud of,” said Dem-Con CEO Jason Haus.
New technologies and practices are creating new frontiers of recycling.
SKB Environmental of Rosemount started recycling shingles only three years ago but already recycles 12,000 tons a year, according to CEO Rick O’Gara.
Companies have found ways to melt and clean shingles to reuse the 22-percent asphalt content. That asphalt is now reused in such products as roadways.
Concrete is a stalwart of recycling. For decades, companies have crushed concrete and masonry into nuggets to be used as the foundation layer for roads or parking lots. It replaces gravel, which doesn’t have to be mined, washed and hauled to new job sites.
SKB recycles 200,000 tons of concrete a year, a volume that has been steady since the 1980s, said O’Gara.
Metals have long been recycled, but efforts to reclaim them are increasing.
Today, even the reinforcement rods imbedded in concrete are recycled. SKB also recycles about 250,000 tons of metal per year — including the I-35W bridge that collapsed in 2007.
Wood is sometimes valuable enough to reuse.
An old Sears building in Chicago was built with lumber from old-growth forests that was resold to builders, according to Taylor. “That old growth in Wisconsin is now a woman’s floor in Madrid,” he said.
Some efforts are made to reuse wood without destroying it.
Whole cabinets, doors and windows are salvaged and sold in the Re-Store chain of stores, operated by Habitat for Humanity. That chain is expanding, with the present store in New Brighton opening in 2008.
“It’s a way to bring in revenue and do the right thing,” said Habitat spokesman Matt Haugen.
But usually it’s difficult to salvage wood. Builders of new homes generally want new woodwork, not recycled, said Ryan of Carl Bolander & Sons.
“Recycling has to make sense,” he said. “Someone has to buy it.”
Clean pieces of wood can be ground up and recycled as animal bedding, mulch or fuel for incinerators that generate power. Dem-Con of Shakopee recycles 40 tons of wood every day.
But not wood that has been painted or stained.
“A wooden house is not a good recyclable product,” said Ryan. It’s too difficult to separate the shingles, wallboard and lumber and the small amounts of metals.
Other materials, including plaster, carpet and glass, are virtually impossible to recycle — for now.
That might change. The range of recyclable products is expanding. On the horizon are ways to reprocess vinyl siding and even drywall, said Dem-Con’s Haus.
At the demolished library in the Hennepin-Lake district, supervisor Alvord was looking at wreckage in a new way.
Workers had already saved the glycol from the heating systems, the fluids from elevator machinery, the lights from the ceilings. They had stripped off the shingles, wood and most metals.
Alvord watched a backhoe working on the remains of a parking ramp. It wasn’t smashing anything — it picked at the wreckage almost daintily, teasing the metal from the concrete like someone plucking a hair from a salad.
How does he decide what to recycle?
“We recycle anything and everything,” said Alvord.