C&D News

The Dubai-based Al Rostamani Group has launched Emirates Recycling LLC, which is dedicated to the recycling and recovery of the city’s construction and demolition debris.

The Emirates Recycling plant will have the capacity to convert the more than 8 million tons of construction material generated in Dubai per year into usable road and construction base aggregate.

According to a press release from the Al Rostamani Group, the facility will be fully operational by September 2007.

Hussain Nasser Lootah, acting director general of Dubai Municipality, says the city handled 10.5 million tons of C&D debris in 2006. C&D material makes up 75 percent of the total waste generated in Dubai every year, according to Lootah.

The Emirates Recycling plant will be located nearly 20 meters below the surface to minimize noise and dust pollution in the surrounding area.

In addition to crushers, power screeners and other technology and equipment, the plant will also be equipped with external dust suppression units and with mobile units.

A proposed ban on burning wood from construction and demolition debris has moved closer to becoming law in New Hampshire, according to a report in the Concord Monitor (Concord, N.H.).

The state Senate has approved a bill already passed by the House that would create a permanent ban on burning the material, replacing a moratorium that will end Dec. 31.

Gov. John Lynch has said he will sign the bill into law, according to the report.

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. "Currently, there are no wood fuel power plants, except for some that use residues from the logging industry, in New Hampshire, so there is nobody using C&D wood fuel now in the state, although a couple such facilities have been proposed," he said in an earlier news report. "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."

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.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released a draft report that evaluates an alternative demolition process for buildings containing asbestos.

Scientists and engineers from EPA’s National Risk Management Research Laboratory and the Dallas regional office compared the current process of demolishing an asbestos-containing structure with a new method called the Alternative Asbestos Control Method (AACM). The first demonstration project was successfully completed in Fort Chaffee, Ark. Preliminary findings show the AACM procedures to be protective for cleanup of many asbestos-containing buildings.

Two similar buildings containing similar types and quantities of asbestos were demolished last April. One demolition used AACM, and one used the standard National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) method. Environmental emissions were monitored during demolition.

The current NESHAP process involves removal of some asbestos materials prior to demolition of a structure. After demolition, the removed asbestos and the demolished structure are disposed of in approved landfills.

Similarly, the alternative method removes some friable asbestos materials, but some asbestos-containing materials remain. The structure is then wetted with amended water to control the release of asbestos fiber prior to and during demolition. Demolition debris and several inches of affected soil from the AACM process are disposed of as asbestos-containing debris at an approved landfill.

Data from the evaluation demonstrated lower than expected levels of asbestos and reduced potential for worker exposure. The cost and time savings for the first study were also found to be significant.

The draft report is available at www.epa.gov/region06/6xa/asbestos.htm.