An Uneven Map

Common wisdom has held that the amount of C&D recycling taking place in a given state or city is directly related to the tipping fees faced for disposal of C&D materials.

There is nothing to indicate that this bit of wisdom has been turned upside down, but some observers are questioning whether tipping fees have lost their status as the number one factor influencing C&D recycling activity.

Without question, the highest tipping fees still provide an incentive to recycle concrete and wood in places like New England and southern California. But even in places where disposal costs are low, other factors (most of them economic) are still working to advance the progress of the C&D recycling industry.

Ranging Far and Wide

A bag of chips or a six-pack of orange soda may cost about the same in Dallas, Denver or Detroit, but the same can’t be said for tipping fees at landfills.

Whether examining costs at municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills or specialty C&D landfills, the costs can vary greatly from state to state or even within different parts of larger states.

According to a 1994 survey done for the U.S. EPA, there were some 1,900 C&D landfills in the U.S. at that time. Michael Taylor, executive director of the National Association of Demolition Contractors (NADC), Doylestown, Pa., estimates that the number may now be closer to 1,800.

A June 1998 report prepared for the U.S. EPA entitled “Characterization of Building-Related Construction and Demolition Debris in the United States,” notes that “Solid waste rules in most states do not require the [C&D] landfills to provide the same level of environmental protection as landfills licensed to receive MSW. Therefore, C&D landfills generally have lower tipping fees, and handle a large fraction of the C&D debris.”

Varying state regulations are just one factor affecting the pricing (and availability of) C&D landfills. The availability of land itself, of course is another.

“You have the pressures in the northeast of diminishing landfill space coupled with high labor costs (to truck materials a far distance to a landfill),” remarks the NADC’s Taylor of the higher tipping fees to be found in New England and eastern New York.

But Taylor notes that some states that would seem to offer abundant land for C&D landfilling purposes are passing strict regulations to limit their landfill space. With the amount of solid waste flowing out of populous states increasing each year, even a seemingly isolated state such as Wyoming has begun to tighten its landfill policies to avoid becoming the nation’s dumping ground should solid waste haulers continue to seek out distant dumping grounds.

According to Taylor, officials in Wyoming are leery of the state’s presence along Interstate 80 as making it a future target for waste streaming in from both coasts. It has also become increasingly difficult to zone a landfill in agricultural states such as Iowa, where farmland is vigilantly protected from urban encroachment.

There is no perceived landfill crisis in many parts of the country, however, where tipping fees are still low enough not to be considered a burden for demolition or construction contractors seeking a home for unwanted materials.

“In some parts of Michigan, demolition debris can be tipped for $8 a ton,” notes Taylor, and figures in other Midwestern and Southern states are also in the single digits per ton.

The Texas Natural Resource Conservation Committee (TNRCC), Austin, divides the state into 24 regions for the purposes of calculating tipping fees. Although the TNRCC does not have figures for the state’s C&D landfills, tipping fee averages for the state’s MSW landfills show some disparity even between regions in the state.

1999 figures show the region with the lowest tipping fees at $14.20 per ton, while the highest average fees are $34 per ton. The state average falls almost mid-way between those extremes, at $25.23 per ton.

Florida is a state with an active aggregates recycling market, but yet is also home to the most C&D landfills (277) as of the 1994 EPA survey.

But that number may have reached its peak, according to recycling industry advisor Steve Levetan of Resource Services, Atlanta.

“Permitting in Florida now is more involved than it used to be, with groundwater monitoring and other requirements added,” says Levetan. “An operator just can’t find an old pit and fill it up.”

At one time, recycling advocates were convinced that landfill space would disappear so quickly that generators of all types of waste (including concrete, wood, gypsum and other materials) would be forced to turn almost exclusively to recycling by the year 2000.

While that push into recycling may not have been as strong as was predicted by some, there have been some good economic opportunities that are pulling construction and demolition contractors increasingly toward recycling.

The Pull from Demand

As mentioned above, Florida has more C&D landfills than any other state, so disposal should never be that difficult for a contractor.

And yet, Florida also has one of the most active secondary aggregates industries. That industry wasn’t pushed into existence because of landfill regulations, but rather grew from the demand side in a state where natural aggregates are hard to find.

The state’s concrete and asphalt crusher operators compete vigorously for materials—to the point where, much like with scrap metal, some companies are paying for concrete chunks and slabs to run through their machines. “If anyone tells you they’re charging a tipping fee for concrete in Florida, they’re lying,” says one of the state’s crushing plant operators.

Those in the asphalt paving industry have claimed that their material is now among the most commonly recycled in the U.S., and the demand for and acceptance of the end product helped make that possible at least as much as the desire to remove hauling and disposal costs.

The 1990s seem to have marked a turning point for concrete and asphalt recycling, where the economic virtues of recycling helped establish the infrastructure to a level enjoyed by metals and paper recyclers.

Scrap metal generated at demolition sites is seldom disposed of no matter how low local tipping fees are, because there are paying customers for the material. Increasingly, a similar situation exists for concrete and asphalt generated at large project sites. (Although commonly, that paying customer must be located on or very near the project site, or at least nearer than the closest landfill.)

The same economic virtues cannot always be ascertainable for scrap wood, gypsum and mixed C&D waste generated by the two industries.

The NADC’s Taylor, though, notes that southern California’s is among the markets where scrap wood is valued. “There is an active trade in Mexico in de-nailed scrap lumber,” Taylor comments. “And processed waste wood also has a waiting end market as a fuel supplement at power plants in California’s central valley,” he adds.

Nationwide, a healthy landscaping industry has created a growing demand for mulch, wood chips and other products that can be created from waste wood. While neither the demand for nor the infrastructure in place to create products made from waste wood is quite as great as that for secondary aggregates, the 1990s marked an impressive advance in the establishment of wood recycling as an industry.

Those two materials combined make up a healthy percentage of what—just 10 or 15 years ago—was being tipped into C&D landfills.

In the 1998 EPA report, several studies were performed and/or brought together in an attempt to determine which materials make up what percentage of the construction and demolition waste streams.