C & D News

Aggregate Machinery Inc. has announced the sale of a large portable asphalt and concrete crushing plant to Raisch Products, a California-based company that specializes in road construction. While focusing on construction, the company also has begun spending more time and energy on demolition.

The piece of equipment, which weighs more than 150,000 pounds, will be able to process 500 to 800 tons of concrete and asphalt per hour when it is operational.

Roger Jensen, with Aggregate Machinery, says Raisch planned to have the recycling plant setup and operational in July.

Jensen says that the new portable plant will significantly reduce the setup time that the company typically has with its other crushing equipment.

Raisch has a total of three sites in California, and the plan is to move the portable crusher to all three sites.

According to published reports, the cost of the recycling plant is more than $4 million.

New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch has signed a bill into law permanently banning the burning of wood from construction and demolition debris streams as a fuel source in the state.

The ban takes effect Jan. 1, 2008, effectively replacing a moratorium on burning the material that expires Dec. 31.

William Turley, executive director of the Construction Materials Recycling Association (CMRA), has said the ban could slam the door shut on an important market for recycled C&D debris in New England. "We might see these ideas that C&D wood is in some way unsafe spread to other states, and we don’t want this untrue concept to take hold," he said in an earlier news report.

The CMRA, through its Issues & Education Fund, has been working with the University of New Hampshire on research to present to the state government that would provide evidence that C&D wood can be used as wood fuel with comparable environmental impacts to other fuel products.

A mandatory construction and demolition debris management policy has taken effect in Canmore, Alberta, Canada, according to a report in the Rocky Mountain Outlook (Canmore).

The policy took effect June 1 and is mandatory for any construction project requiring a building permit. It requires builders to outline their plans for diverting debris and detailing tonnage recycled.

According to the report, about 7,000 metric tons per year of C&D debris is landfilled. A construction and demolition task force has been working on the issue since 2003. The goal is to reduce the amount of C&D debris going to landfill by 40 percent, according to the report.

The third Asphalt Shingle Recycling Forum will be Nov. 1-2 in downtown Chicago.

The event will offer an opportunity to learn the latest recycling techniques and markets for asphalt shingles, and organizers say the event will build upon the success of the second forum, which was in April 2003 in Minnesota and attracted 115 participants from 25 states and Canadian provinces.

The forum, to be convened by the U.S. EPA, Federal Highway Administration and the Construction Materials Recycling Association (CMRA), will cover topics such as mix designs for use in hot mix asphalt, health and safety issues in processing, market development incentives, best management practices, economics and other emerging issues related to recycling asphalt shingles. In addition, an exhibition area will provide information on the latest equipment and services available to the shingle recycling industry.

Additional information, including online registration, is available at www.shinglerecycling.org.  

The Chittenden (Vermont) Solid Waste District has reported that it neither saved nor spent extra money during a recent renovation project that focused on recycling construction material, according to a report in the Burlington Free Press (Burlington, Vt.).

Throughout the winter, a contractor added four offices to the Solid Waste District’s administration building, replaced the roof and updated the building’s interior. The project cost about $170,000.

According to the report, as an experiment, the district instructed the contractor to sort and recycle as much as possible. The contractor recycled about 23 percent of what would usually be thrown away. The large amount of discarded asphalt roofing shingles were difficult to recycle on the renovation project, according to the report. In light of this, the contractor said that other projects could yield a higher recycling rate.

According to the report, the contractor found no real cost difference in recycling.

More information is available online at www.cswd.net.  

Trash volumes have risen statewide in North Carolina, and counties in the northeastern part of the state generated more trash per person than the state average in 2005 and 2006, with much of that material coming from construction debris, according to a report in the Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.).

More than a ton of trash for each person went to landfills from July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006, according to an annual state report.

North Carolina’s landfills received 10.7 million tons of solid waste, including construction debris during fiscal year 2005-2006, the report states. The amount of C&D debris has increased three times faster than the amount of municipal solid waste.