ERRCO: A Dream Comes True

It took nearly eight years to site, permit and build, but only a little more than one year to ramp up to a capacity of receiving and processing more than 500 tons of construction and demolition debris per day. Today, Environmental Resource Return Corp.’s C&D recycling facility in Epping, N.H., is a shining example of the determination, hard work and dogged persistence that so often characterizes those who strive to make recycling more mainstream and profitable. And most of the effort to make ERRCO a reality came from Matthew Senior, the company’s president.

STICKS AND STONES

Eleven years ago, in 1986, Senior graduated from the University of New Hampshire. Like most students, graduating brought the promise of working in a chosen field, as well as the fear of trying to break into the job market. Senior, who was involved in environmental studies, was no different. He managed to stay close to his field of study and started working with a company called Hazemag, a maker of crushing equipment based in Germany. This afforded Senior the opportunity to travel throughout Europe and experience various C&D recycling operations.

After a year with Hazemag, Senior left the company and came back to the United States, as he was getting the itch to start his own C&D recycling operation. On his own, and with money he had saved, he began touring various domestic C&D processing sites. Along the way he was introduced to a firm called ReTech, Meyerstown, Pa. – makers of screening and processing equipment for the C&D market.

“They were the ones that basically gave me the extra push I needed,” says Senior. “They showed me how easy it really was to take all of this material, separate it and market it. I was amazed how simple it was. It is basically separating sticks and stones, but on a much larger scale, with picking, screening and conveying.”

Convinced that there was an opportunity at hand, and wanting to locate in New Hampshire, Senior made his next big step toward entering the recycling business. Upon returning to New Hampshire in 1988, he joined forces with his college friend Jonathan Hixon, now ERRCO’s vice president. Together they found a suitable site in Epping, a town about 30 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, and just north of the Massachusetts border.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better location,” says Senior. “The town was very receptive, so much so that I think that we were the only company up until then to receive a unanimous vote from the town council to go ahead with a project. They didn’t have that ‘not-in-my-back-yard’ attitude.”

However, Senior’s quest to build and operate a state-of-the-art C&D recycling facility was just beginning, and what would happen during the next seven years would surely be enough to test the mettle of any entrepreneur.

PROBLEMS WITH PERMITS

All businesses – regardless of what market they serve – have to be permitted in one way or another, and recycling and scrap businesses certainly have their share of the permitting pie. Senior knew his company would have to obtain several permits before operations at Epping could begin, but he didn’t realize that in the end, it would take 14 different permits before anything could be done.

“We had to get a permit for proper zoning, site review, wetlands, road entrance, ground water and solid waste – to name a few,” says Senior. “It was crazy, because as we were busy getting the next permit, the ones we had already acquired were expiring on us.”

Also involved with some of the permits were extensive background checks on Senior and his fledgling company. “It’s not something that I would like to do again,” he says.

It took about three years for the company to get its first permit, and another three years to obtain all 14 that were required.

The hardest permit to get was the Resource Recovery Permit, says Senior. “It defines all the conditions to handle and manage solid waste in the state,” he says. “And even though we, and others in the recycling industry, view C&D recovery as ‘recycling,’ the state does not – it looks at recycling activities as solid waste activities.”

The other significant hurdle to jump in getting the business started was obtaining enough capital to properly build and run the facility.

“People have to realize that when we first received approval from the Epping town council back in 1988 for this facility, the booming eighties were still booming,” says Senior. “Then, as we all know, the economy went sour, and the recession hit.”

As a result, it was particularly difficult to convince financiers to lend money and others to invest in the Epping project. “This area, the Northeast, was especially hard hit during the recession,” says Senior. “Many banks were closing, and the FDIC was taking over several others. No one wanted to do business with start-ups, and no one wanted to start up a business anyway.”

So Senior and Hixon continued to pump their own money and money from relatives into the proposed project. But they would still need a significant amount of capital to make their dream come true.

In 1991 ERRCO, a company still in name only, landed a venture capitalist who was familiar with the recycling industry. “He had good contacts and knew the industry very well,” says Senior. “It was the break that we needed.” But the economy was still in a recession, and the struggle for permits for ERRCO was still being waged.

STAYING ALIVE

The period from between 1991 until additional funding came through in 1995 to build the Epping facility was a particularly trying time for Senior and Hixon. Although venture capital was in place, the permitting procedure was dragging.

“All I wanted to do was to keep the facility alive any way that I could,” says Senior, and to him, that meant visiting the site as often as he could. “I would go there and clear the land, remove stumps, chop wood – anything to stay in touch with why I was doing all this in the first place.”

Senior eventually bought a small trailer to work out of, and used his pickup to haul chopped wood and other materials. “I was selling firewood and screening topsoil to make ends meet,” he says. “Also, I was doing these activities to show the community, our investor and any potential investor that there was work in progress at the site, and that it wasn’t just words.”

Then in March of 1994, Senior was able to secure a bank loan for $3.2 million. Coupled with the $2.5 million from the venture capitalist, ERRCO now had enough money to begin to build.

“We closed on the bank loan in February of 1995, and that was a special day for me,” says Senior. “Actually, after all the challenges, I did not know what to do after I signed the last page of a one-foot high pile of loan documents. I remember saying to myself, ‘What now?’ I thought that I was suppose to be handed something.

“Later, when I received the first check for $1.2 million, it was just an incredible feeling,” continues Senior. “When I walked up to the cashier at my bank to deposit it, she thought I was joking, because she knew what I had been through.”

Soon after that first check was cashed, the building phase began, with Senior acting as the site’s general contractor, supervising all aspects of the construction. In addition, money had to be set aside in the form of bonds to cover any material removal costs if, for some reason, the site was to go out of business at a future date. “It was a condition that the Epping town council wanted, because they did not want to be stuck with any cleanup operations if we were to close our doors at a later date and had piles of C&D debris laying around,” says Senior.

By August 1995 the bonds were secured and the facility was completed, and by October 1995, Senior’s dream was finally beginning to become a reality as the facility began processing its first C&D material.

BUILDING OF DREAMS

The ERRCO facility is situated on 80 acres. The building itself occupies 22,500 square feet, and contains a variety of processing equipment, including an infeed track conveyor, a disk screen discharge conveyor and other conveyors, elevated and normal picking stations, a scalping disk, chip and trommel screens, magnetic separators, a drum magnet, a shredder, a wood hog and a wood and rock recovery tank. Other major equipment includes three hydraulic excavators with grapples for moving material outside of the building, three loaders, a grader, a skid steer, two forklifts and a newly purchased MaxiGrind shredder.

C&D debris comes mainly from a 50-mile radius around the facility, but lately material from as far south as Boston and as far north as Maine has been entering the site.

“We are lucky, in a way,” admits Senior, “because we happen to be right off a new interchange of the 101 freeway that connects Manchester to Interstate 95. It’s an excellent trucking route and they put the interchange in right after we built the facility. We had no idea it was going in at the time.”

Currently, the facility is processing about 50 to 60 tons of material an hour. Material is dumped outside the building in a large tipping area where various items such as large metal pieces of scrap and other objects are removed. Next, material is placed on an elevated, 72-inch-wide track conveyor that enters the building. The conveyor discharges the material onto a 66-inch-wide, electrically-powered disc screen. Any material that is 6 inches or smaller falls through the screen and is collected on a 48-inch-wide conveyor below. The disk screen mainly separates the larger lumber pieces from any aggregate and small pieces of wood. On the bottom 48-inch conveyor, the smaller fines pass over a drum magnet to remove any ferrous material.

Above, the larger-than-6-inch material from the disc screen is directed to an elevated picking line where workers sort out any contaminated material, such as plastic bottles, papers or any ferrous and nonferrous metals into four drop chutes with containers at the ends. The containers are then removed using the forklift trucks. ERRCO is currently using inmates who are part of a nearby prison work release program to do the picking and other tasks. “These are people who have committed minor offenses, so it gives me great pride that we are able to be socially responsible, as well,” says Senior.

ERRCO is responsible for transporting the inmates to and from the detention center, and the company pays them wages that are above minimum wage.

The lumber remaining on the overhead conveyor goes into a shredder and then passes under an inline, self-cleaning magnet where ferrous fractions from that stream are pulled out. After the shredder, the material is combined with the previously sorted less-than-6-inch material from the disc screen. Together, both streams enter the primary trommel screen, which is equipped with a three-eights-inch wire screen.

The trommel separates out any dirt, aggregate and sand. The material that falls through the trommel normally makes up about 20 percent of the incoming C&D debris stream. These fines are collected and removed.

The material coming out of the trommel passes by a second line of pickers, nicknamed the “nit pickers” by employees. “They are there mainly to catch any nonferrous that might have slipped through,” says Senior. At this time, he does not feel that an eddy current separator is needed.

The leftover material enters a flotation separator that removes mud and any rocks and cleans the wood. Rocks are removed from the building by another conveyor. From the flotation separator, wood is fed into a top-feed wood hog that produces 2-inch nominal chips, which are conveyed away and pass under another inline magnet to remove any remaining ferrous material.

Finally, the wood is conveyed to a chip screen that removes any oversized material, which is fed back to the wood hog for reprocessing. It also separates the stream into two different sized products, and then the finished products are conveyed out of the building.

The wood products are sold to paper mills as fuel for boilers; the ferrous and nonferrous metals are sold to a scrap yard; soil is sold as landfill cover and as slope stabilization material; and screened-out aggregate is used as road base material. All other material that can’t be recycled – only a very small amount – is landfilled.

“We have about a 97 percent recycling rate,” says Senior. “Only 3 percent is landfilled.”

ON THE HORIZON

While the majority of the recycling takes place inside the main building, ERRCO is expanding outside, too. The company recently purchased a MaxiGrind mobile shredder to reduce already clean wood waste material into chips. “It takes care of heavy stuff that doesn’t need screening, like stumps and branches,” says Senior. “It’s a one-pass operation.”

ERRCO is also looking to expand its product line. Now, all the wood shred is used for fuel, but the company is looking into making mulch. “We rented a mulch colorizing machine, and we are going to see how that works out for us,” he says.

Finally, ERRCO may branch out to other sites, though Senior doesn’t expect that to happen soon. The company has been approached by several other firms to start operations elsewhere, but Senior wants to make sure the Epping facility is firmly on its feet before he ventures into new projects. “Right now we are dealing with a lot of landfills in the region that are closing,” he says. “That may sound like good news for us, but those landfills are just trying to generate cash flow in order to close. That means they have reduced their tipping fees substantially, and it has diverted some business away from our facility. When these landfills close in 1998, I think we’ll be even stronger.”

Senior admits he is not the cheapest when it comes to tipping fees, and says that there really is no loyalty to recycling. “It’s all price driven, and the haulers go to where the tipping fees are the cheapest. And I don’t want to get into the business of picking up and hauling material back to our site. I don’t want to compete with my customers.”

The author is managing editor of Recycling Today.