Hitting the Jackpot

The City Center was a very ambitious project right from the get go—18 million square feet on 66 acres. At any one time, there were going to be 6,500 workers on the site. They were looking to obtain a Gold LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating on all the buildings they possibly could. I believe the only exception was a portion of the casino that allowed smoking. All other facilities did obtain the LEED Gold rating.

Materials recycled from the project included all the metals, plastic, wood, concrete, asphalt, drywall and green waste, and the C&D fines were used as ADC (alternative daily cover). There was a three-and-a-half-year construction time frame.

When Evergreen got involved in [the project], it was approximately six months before they actually put a spade in the ground. There was a lot of prep work to do. An existing 10-story concrete-block hotel called The Boardwalk was destroyed. I think they saw a 90 percent recycling rate out of that with giving the furniture away, demolishing the building and using a lot of the concrete for the project. A lot of that [concrete] was used for roadways and base material. So they had a very successful start to the project.

Evergreen had a lot of experience with LEED projects. In 2003, the state legislature in Nevada passed a law incentivizing companies to build green. We started the USGBC (U.S. Green Building Council) chapter in 2003 with 10 members. I think we are up to 300 to 400 now. Some great things have been done with LEED. People don’t typically think of Las Vegas as a green city, but you would be shocked to see what is there.

MGM had planned this big project from the beginning. The idea of it was to create a city within a city so that you could go there and wouldn’t have to go anywhere else. Entertainment, residential, different five-star hotels and restaurants would all be located within that area, which is centrally located on The Strip, so those were challenges there.

ANALYZING THE OPTIONS
When we first started talking to them, three recycling options were considered. One is what I call an on-site, low-tech ground sort, which is known as dump and pick in the vernacular. That was the preference of the LEED consultants because they could keep a watchful eye on the material. As soon as the construction superintendents got into the picture, they said, “We are not having sorting operations on our site.”

Then they said they wanted to have multiple bins with on-site source separation. That sounded pretty good until the superintendents came back to the meeting and said, “OK, so I am going to tell a 25-year veteran iron worker that he has to throw his plastic bottle in a particular bin?” That wasn’t realistic.

Then someone came up with the idea of commingling the material in a single-stream fashion and taking  it off site for sorting. The only problem with that was, at the height of this project, you were looking at 500 tons a day. So how do you do that in a dump-and-pick operation? Well, frankly, you don’t.

MANY, MANY, CHALLENGES
There were challenges as a result of those discussions and the decision to move the material off site. First, there wasn’t a facility that existed, which was a pretty big hurdle. There was no outlet for recycled drywall, which was going to be a significant portion of the waste stream. The preconstruction estimate was that there were going to be 1.2 million board feet of drywall to be installed in this project. Taking some of the figures that we heard before, that 10 to 20 percent of the drywall could be waste, you had a significant portion that you have to account for in your LEED points.

Additionally, it was a very tight site and there were transportation issues. There was material that had to be moving off the site 24/7. We had three shifts working there.

Another challenge, not the least of which, was the rapid growth of my own company. We had about 20 employees, including drivers and office personnel. There were essentially three of us in the office, four with the bookkeeper we hired in 2005. What we had to do was increase our asset base by something like 8,000 percent. We had to borrow millions and millions of dollars. We had to go from 20 employees to 80 employees. And we had to acquire not only additional properties adjacent to us because we were on one-and-a-half acres, but I had to acquire easement rights for a fire line.

On the 66-acre site, MGM City Center, which was its own organization at the time, had constructed 200,000 square feet of office space for the three-and-a-half-year project. That office still exists today. That site is destined for a tower sometime; it will be demolished. It had been intended to be demolished by now, but of course plans have changed because of the economy. But that is the scope of project. The contractor, Perini Building Co., had 200,000 square feet of modular space next to that [office]. So you had 400,000 square feet of support structure running this project and thousands of employees. It was quite something to see.

Transportation was an issue, not just on the site, but since we were running 24/7 there, we also had the issue of still serving our customer base. Our reputation in the market was for good service where you want it, when you want it and how you want it. We didn’t want that to change. We had to restructure our whole logistics operation.

Those were the challenges, what were the solutions?

Obviously [we needed] a rapid planning process for finances, operations and logistics. Essentially, we had to acquire 4 acres, get them zoned and permitted, design a facility, get it passed by all the environmental authorities and get it constructed in 14 months. This is how we did it. We knew that the numbers were key up front. We actually hired someone in logistics. She happened to be my niece. She is an MIT grad. We had her on retainer to come down and do a five-year projection. It was only a three-and-a-half-to-four-year project, but we did a five-year projection on capital investment, return on that investment, cash flow, working capital and all of those items. That took us about three months, and then we were able to go to the banks. With the help of the SBA (Small Business Administration), we were able to finance the project.

We agreed we would construct the facility for the exclusive hauling rights. Now remember that the project was getting ready to start, so not only did we have this narrow window of development time but we had a to do it knowing that the volume of material coming off of the site was going to grow daily.

Last but not the least of the challenges was that we had to do all of this while still working on our site, which was only 5 acres. So we had to construct the facility while we were also continuing our dump-and-pick operation. Fortunately, the beginning of the project was all for the most part rebar, concrete and wood—plywood and form lumber. All of those things we had outlets for, so we were still able to maintain high diversion rates even though we were on a low-tech ground sort.

I went to the local [CertainTeed] factory guy, who was looking to recycle. He was my advocate. I said, “How would it be if you could make drywall in this plant from the scraps of City Center’s first floor and sell them the recycled-content drywall they used on the 40th floor?”

I had to get MGM and Perini to buy some of that drywall, but they got LEED points for that, as well. That seemed to be the convincing argument. We did pay a tipping fee. It was less than the landfill [fee], but we were able to recycle [the drywall]. I am grateful to those people for seeing the light and understanding the beauty of that closed loop.
 
And then, of course, when we started construction, we were on six 10-hour shifts, working our butts off to try to get the facility built. We ordered equipment. We had a very simple sort line.

NO IS NOT AN ANSWER
Last, but not least, don’t take no for an answer, because if I had taken no for an answer, I wouldn’t be standing here today talking to you about this. We started construction in June of 2006. Once we were under construction, my engineer came to me and said, “We’ve got a problem. We can’t put the fire sprinkler system in because we don’t have enough pressure in the line.”

I said, “OK, where do we have to bring it from.” He showed me. After I choked on the price, he said that was not the worst of it. He said we couldn’t just run easements down the streets. We had to run across this property or that property. The last piece of property was for sale. I went to the broker, who said he didn’t think they were interested. And I said, “I am going to improve your property. I am going to bring water across there and I’m going to waive any connection fees and provide reimbursements when they come. Don’t you think your owners ought to know that?”

He said, “Yeah, I think so.”

So we had a meeting with the owners, three ladies in their 80s. Their husbands had bought the property and had all passed away. I explained that they needed easement and that it was not going to take up too much of their property and would add value. I said I’d give them X amount of dollars.

They said OK.

Obviously there are some times when you get a “No” and you walk away. But if it is critical to your progress and the path that you set upon, don’t take no for an answer.
 
There was an average of 160 tons a day over the three-and-a-half years [of the project], and a total of 130,000 tons were recycled. The low was 5 tons per day. We did 22,000 roll-off pulls. We had a combined recycling rate of 92 percent. I say combined because the contractor handled all of the concrete track out. That material was all recycled, with about 88 percent going through our plant.

We had a perfect safety record. No accidents, no injuries. No recorded service failures. We can go back to that company now and they love to do business with us.

SURPRISES ARISE
What were some of the surprises?

I am a little bit embarrassed about the first one, because when they told us there were going to be 6,500 workers, we should have figured out that there were going to be a lot of plastic bottles and aluminum cans. But we were shocked at the amount. We had to jerry-rig a different sorting station off of our sorting line just to handle the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles and the aluminum cans. I don’t know that we ever separated and measured the particular amounts from that project, but they had to be in the hundreds of tons.

We literally got hundreds of tons of copper cable and 1.5-inch thick aluminum cable with a copper jacket on it, to the extent where we looked at it and thought we had enough volume to up-value the material. We actually bought a granulator for the small cable (No. 14 No. 12 copper wire). For the big stuff, we bought a stripper and a shear, cut it off in 2.5-inch lengths, stripped the jacket, recycled the jacket…and then we moved the material by gondola to the port of Los Angeles to Asia.

You’ve heard how everyone picks wood off the line. Well, in our line, everybody picked wire, no matter whether you were a wood picker or a metal picker, you picked wire. Every station had a garbage can, a 96-gallon tub, and I would see those totes get emptied once a day.

Lastly, we got a call from the site during the excavation. They excavated about 200 feet deep. And the guy called and said, “We found a car. …What do we do with it?”

I said, “Just put it in the box and bring it over here.”
 

COMMUNICATION IS KEY
I didn’t emphasize enough the communication [required]. This began from day one, not only within my own organization [but also] with planning and development. We had daily meetings. We literally had about 100 people to get this project off the ground.

On the other side, with the contractor and the owner, we had some experience with LEED reporting. They had 15 LEED APs (accredited professionals) who had different parts of the project and we had to work with them continually and we issued monthly reports to them. They constantly inspected the facility. And then the contractor himself, the superintendent, we gave him numbers. Certain drivers had laptops, and we would get e-mails to come to one particular part of the site to pick up a certain bin. In many cases they tagged the bin with some red tape or whatever the case might be—anything to accelerate moving that material off the site. …We were pulling about 80 boxes a day, and that was in addition to our other business, which was substantial.

As an organization, by planning and picking the right people, you can have a successful project, too. 
The author is area director of business development, Southern Nevada recycling centers, at Republic Services’ Evergreen Recycling unit.

To hear a podcast of Rob Dorinson’s presentation in its entirety, visit www.recyclingtoday.com/cd-forum-dorinson.aspx

Rob Dorinson is area director of business development, Southern Nevada recycling centers, at Republic Services’ Evergreen Recycling unit.