Beyond Demolition

New Jersey’s Yannuzzi Group makes concrete recycling a major part of its business plan.

To the uninitiated, Yannuzzi Group Inc. may appear to be a typical New Jersey demolition company—family owned, a lot of projects including high profile public works, and a solid place in the fast moving, fast talking world of the Garden State and Empire State demolition industries.

But the Orange, N.J.-based company is more than that, and like many demolition contractors has embraced diversification of its services. One sideline that fits in nicely with the company’s activities and profit goals is concrete recycling.

Indeed, the name of the demolition division is Yannuzzi Demolition & Recycling Corp., and it is a division that processes more than 400,000 tons of concrete every year, according to John Yannuzzi. “I don’t know what we would do without recycling,” he says. “It seems we are crushing every day, at one job or another.”

The company recycles only concrete, although its demolition operations also include the industry-standard recovery of recyclable materials—wood, metals, etc.—during demolition projects. But Yannuzzi has discovered it is very cost-efficient to recycle concrete. The practice also provides other advantages.

“It allows us to more effectively use our trucks,” Yannuzzi says, “because if they are not needed to move waste from a demolition site, they can be used to either move concrete to where a company crusher is working or move processed concrete to a customer.”

But probably the most important part is the economic advantage recycling gives. The company did a cost analysis before buying its first recycling crusher in 1990. It compared shipping all the waste concrete to one of the many recycling centers in the area. The parameters were thus: For trucking off and disposing of raw concrete, first it had to be downsized with a pulverizer, its own cost. Besides the trucking costs, there are tipping fees, which are relatively high in Northern New Jersey and New York City. “And you know the recycling centers are selling the finished product and making money,” Yannuzzi adds.

Another problem a demolition company could face without its own crushing capacity is a recycling center with no more room for infeed material. “If they say they have enough and can’t take any more, then you can be stuck with two buildings and nowhere to go with them.”

Lastly, processing waste concrete into a recycled product before taking it off a demolition site saves on trucking another way, as there are fewer air pockets with recycled concrete. That could mean as many as 10% fewer hauls, which is a lot when it’s a big job with 300 to 500 loads. For these reasons, Yannuzzi decided having its own crusher was the way to go.

That doesn’t mean Yannuzzi Demolition & Recycling’s trip down the recycling path was made of primrose. John Yannuzzi admits that with the company’s first crusher, a portable Excel 2200 horizontal impactor, there was a huge learning curve about concrete recycling that came with it. “Fortunately we were making twice as much money back then for our crushing, and could afford to learn. Now there are a lot of other people out there with crushers, and the market is much more competitive. I realized a few years ago we needed to do more tonnage in order to be competitive. We could no longer do 800 to 1,000 tons per day, we had to do 1,500 to 1,800.”

Yannuzzi bought a new portable plant more than two years ago, a Model 1200 from Eagle Crusher. It is another portable horizontal impact crusher that is also quick to knock down and set up. The crushing system includes, on the same trailer, a five feet by 16 feet double-deck screen, a recirculating conveyor, and is powered by a 320-hp diesel. The travel height is 13 feet. five inches, and the width is 11 feet, 11 inches.

Each of the crushing systems has its own dedicated operating crew. On the Eagle, two pickers are usually employed to remove contaminants, mostly large rebar, with one other person operating the crusher and another feeding it. All the operators on the machine wear harnesses to help prevent falls, and Yannuzzi has added several guardrails to also protect the workers.

The inlet feeder on the crusher is 45-1/2 inches by 35 inches, but the machine is usually fed only chunks of around one foot in size or so. This saves wear on the blow bars and allows for high production and for better inspection for contaminants.

Inmany ways, a demolition contractor recycling concrete at a demolition site is different than on a paving job or at a stationary plant. Usually the contractor has several pieces of mobile equipment at the site, mostly excavators with concrete breakers or pulverizing attachments. So bringing the material down to a one-foot infeed size is more economically feasible with that much tracked artillery. Also, the threat of contamination from other building components, especially wood, is always prevalent. Feeding the crusher with an excavator is more common to allow for one last look for contaminants before dumping material in the hopper.

An example of how recycling fits in is a recent project in New Bedford, N.J., where Yannuzzi Demolition & Recycling was hired to bring down four, nine-story public housing buildings. Three of the four buildings would be imploded, meaning added preparation time.

The step before reclamation was asbestos abatement. Workers went through and popped out all the doors, the panelings, everything possible without disturbing the floor tiling or asbestos pipe wrap. As the property had undergone some renovation four years before demolition, a lot of the doors were reusable and given back to the New Bedford Housing Authority. All the other clean wood was sent to a local wood recycler, with lead paint-contaminated wood sent to proper disposal. Of course, all metals possible were taken out and recycled. Appliances were also removed and a “party wall” was broken out on each floor to help with the asbestos abatement.

The abatement was performed by an outside firm. Yannuzzi also has a roll-off service and a general contracting firm that will perform general site work, utility construction, and the like, but the company has found it more cost effective to sub out the abatement work to companies that specialize in that sector. Four underground tanks were also removed by Yannuzzi.

Then it was on to the demolition. It took five days to knock the building down one building down with the wrecking ball, as it was very strong and was of a floating slab construction, meaning there was a lot of metal in the structure.

For the blast, a senior center 130 feet away was evacuated, just in case. Yannuzzi’s trailers were parked across the street in front of a row of apartment buildings. A nearby church was tarped for protection. In deference to the congregation, the implosion of the remaining three buildings was performed on a Saturday morning instead of the usual Sunday time slot. Controlled Demolition Inc. handled the blast, which went well.

The roof was rubber with foam insulation. An attempt was made to remove it for possible re-use, but it was ultimately scraped off and sent to a landfill.

Now that the buildings were down, the concrete recycling process began in earnest. While ordinarily Yannuzzi makes a 1-1/4 inch blend used as either a building or road base, in New Bedford the customer wanted 2-1/2 minus as a fill material for a new parking lot at a nearby shopping center. Like all its recycled products, this one had to be clean, which explains why Yannuzzi was so meticulous about taking the wood out of the building before it was imploded. It is a lot easier to remove it then rather than before it is fed to the crusher. “We have learned that the more we do before the blast or bringing down the building, the easier it is to get rid of the crushed products,” says Yannuzzi.

Yannuzzi Demolition & Recycling works with area brokers to market the material. “Whenever we get a job, they come running because they know we are going to give them a good product,” says Yannuzzi. “We can’t keep it on the ground.”

Increasingly, that product is going to be produced only from concrete generated at a Yannuzzi demolition job. The company did some custom crushing of natural aggregate in a nearby quarry in the 1970s. After the first portable crushing system was purchased in 1990 it was used only for processing concrete, be it for custom crushing or its own demolition job. About three years ago the crushing system was kept captive only for Yannuzzi jobs.

Concrete recycling is not Yannuzzi’s only foray into recycling. In the early 1990s paper recycling was tried, but after market prices dropped steeply in 1995, the company went back to what it knows best. That doesn’t mean other options are not being explored, and John Yannuzzi admits he would like to see the company open a Class B recycling facility somewhere in northern New Jersey in the near future. Recycling is a profitable business, he thinks, and he wants to make sure Yannuzzi Demolition & Recycling gets its share of that market.  C&D

The author is associate publisher of C&D Recycler.