One of the easiest ways to green up abuilding project

Tag : Non-ferrous Metal
Two guys, one on each side of the line, grab mashed cardboard andtoss it into chutes that empty into bins a floor below. The nexttwo guys pull wads of plastic that once shrink-wrapped materials.More guys, more stuff pulled and tossed: Sawed-off hunks of wood,non-ferrous metals - even a rusty wheelbarrow.
Not much makes it to the end of the 10-second ride down the belt.Some soggy insulation, plaster-crusted buckets, painted wood,treated wood and the occasional half-eaten sandwich are all thatend up in the landfill-bound bin.
Three years ago, nearly all the leftovers from Milwaukee buildingsites ended up in landfills. There was nowhere else to put thestuff.
But John Hansen, who started and sold a waste disposal firm in thelate 1990s, realized two years ago that the time was ripe forwholesale recycling of construction debris. Now, this plant on thenorth side of Milwaukee processes an ever-deepening avalanche ofconstruction leftovers, and Hansen plans a new, multimillion-dollarfacility on the city's south side.
Skimming recyclables is one of the easiest ways to green up abuilding project, says Jenna Kunde, executive director of WasteCapWisconsin, a 10-year-old Milwaukee nonprofit consultant to statebusinesses. A ton of waste
A third of the stuff filling Wisconsin's municipal landfills isconstruction waste, she says. The typical 2,000-square-foot newhouse throws off a literal ton of waste - half of it, by weight, iswood and cardboard.
WasteCap has been gradually making inroads with home builders,Kunde says. To date, the bigger local builders have the volume toadopt wholesale recycling programs. Kunde says sending constructiondebris to a recycler can save money, especially considering therising value of scrap materials.
Hansen, though, says he can't count on downstream revenue fromscrap haulers to keep City Wide operating.
He's pitching contractors on the convenience of sending theircontainers of mixed debris to City Wide - they don't have to sortanything at the job site - and the fact that it costs the same -about $35 to $50 a ton - to tip the stuff into Citywide's cavernousplant as it does to dump it in a landfill.
"It's definitely market-driven," Hansen says. "The top people inthe industry are doing it."
Recycling debris is one of the hallmarks of one of the best-known,most authoritative standards for green building, the Leadership inEnergy and Environmental Design, or LEED, Green Building RatingSystem sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council. Remodeling yields less
Commercial builders have been quick to jump on the recyclingbandwagon; residential builders, not as fast - and typically onlywhen customers so dictate in their contracts, Hansen says.
About 75% of new-construction waste can be recycled. But thethrowaways from remodeling often include painted or treated wood,old insulation and wiring, and other hard-to-recycle materials,yielding only 35% to the recycle bins. Old painted cabinets, forinstance, might be impregnated with lead and can't be recycled.
Once builders and clients start recycling, they see theirconstruction sites differently, even finding ways to reuse castoffmaterials later in the project, Kunde says.
"We worked with a couple of home builders who ground wood and usedit for landscape mulch, but now they've gone to having their woodpicked up and processed offsite," she says. "Gravel's an easy oneto recycle on-site."