C&D Diversified

The years we typically view as boom years for construction, 2004 to 2007, meant plenty of growth in the processing of C&D wastes. When the good times in housing were on, it may have seemed receipts from C&D processing would rise indefinitely. But by 2008 and 2009, the echo effect from the earlier downturns, first in residential and then in commercial construction, led to clearly lower levels of C&D processing. As some C&D operations and dealers across the country mention, being able to vary operations to include industries such as the growing biomass processing sector, among others, has helped them weather the C&D receipt losses storm.

Diversifying in Order to Hang on
Prior to the recession, Taunton, MA-based New England Recycling found that its work concentrated mainly on new construction. However, when the housing market went down, the company scooted into the commercial side of things. New England Recycling takes asphalt and concrete from other companies and processes that material. It process approximately 50% concrete and 50% asphalt in the area south of Boston, employing some 30 employees, including drivers.

To take the edge off the C&D downturn, it’s also become involved in biomass processing, grinding down pallets and using this material to supply fuel for pellet plants. Material is also sent north to provide boiler fuel for plants. Clean wood is removed from C&D processing facilities, which in turn is used for boiler fuel.

Because it does not have the tonnage of material coming into its facility to then send out, this side of the business has not been able to make up for the downturn on the C&D side. It used to send four or five loads of fuel per day up to two facilities in Maine-one a papermill and the other an actual power plant. Now that number of loads has dropped to two per day.

But according to Paul Correia, general manager, “Though times are tough for us right now, on the bright side I don’t think they could get much worse. Everyone that you speak to here in the Northeast continues to struggle. There is only a little bit of tonnage to work on, but everyone’s waiting for it.”

Correia has been in this business for 27 years and on the site in Taunton for 15 years. He sees some changes happening now. For example, scrap is heading back up in price. “Better times are ahead. We have to be patient as we wait for them. I guess the silver lining is the equipment we have from CBI. It is so good that I guess at one level it is overkill. It’s very reliable, long-lasting, and does the work we need done.”

New England Recycling has many containers and 12 Kenworth rolloff trucks. In its processing building it has a 72-inch hog and a 36-inch hog by CBI. It has quite a few pieces of equipment, including its 4000 and 4600 and a brand new 4000 CBI electric grinder.

Far-Sighted Use of Equipment
For 22 years, Continental Biomass Industries has been building heavy-duty machines and engineer-designed systems used to process wastestreams into a fuel product or a mulch product, depending on the feedstock. CBI builds portable machines that are either wheel-mounted or track-mounted. Stationary equipment is built for a variety of uses, whether for land-clearing or mulch manufacturing.

Some of the businesses using CBI equipment include Shamrock Recycle and Transfer in Blaine, MN, and Thompson Brothers Industries of North Andover, MA. New England Recycling has now been running its system for four years with virtually no downtime, according to Ed Donovan, general manager for CBI.

CBI has a patented offset-helix rotor that uses kinetic energy in order to consume less power. This technology became the basis for product lines like Grizzly Mill woodwaste hogs, Magnum Force horizontal grinders and chippers, and Annihilator primary shredders. The rotor pattern is available in all of the machines. Its design enables the more productive use of horsepower because it is only introducing one hammer into the material at a time to concentrate the energy. “There is another hammer right behind it, though, as it works the material right to left and then left to right across the entire in-feed, because the hammer and tip design give you more than 100% coverage across the opening,” says Donovan.

Twelve years ago, CBI introduced the Model 8400 (originally called the Model 4800), which has remained virtually unchanged. Both the Model 8400 and CBI’s Grizzly Mill can be equipped with a solid-steel rotor or a high-strength forged drum rotor, but if grinding contaminated material, CBI recommends the solid-steel rotor. Contaminated material can include the processing of railroad ties and demolition waste.

The company has been quite involved with hurricane cleanup efforts and construction and demolition recycling. Some of its machinery is involved with processing railroad ties, which contain contamination. These operations go on, typically, for 10,000-plus hours.

“We’ve recently sold a new machine to a Midwest customer who has processed only railroad ties,” says Donovan. This individual told me he has over 13,000 hours on the old machine already and is buying another one because nobody else is able to show him a machine with that many hours on it, let alone one that has only processed ties.

“What separates us from others out there is that we are capable of designing machines for processing materials that tend to cause other machines to break, adding more value by design, Our equipment is not inexpensive, but in the end it comes down to cost per ton: Just how much does it cost to put the material on the ground.

“We have people involved with land clearing and mulch manufacturing using our portable units, and others using our stationary systems primarily for construction-and-demolition processing. The percentages for uses are a moving target. We are getting a lot more stationary construction-and-demolition system requests this year, whereas I would say in 2007 and 2008 we sold more equipment into the forestry and land-clearing market.”

With the LEED credits now available, there are interesting developments out there, such as biomass projects, pellet projects, and the biggest thing of all, which is the recycling of C&D debris, according to Donovan. CBI has designed systems that pre-crush, screen, and then convey them to allow the customer to pull all the recyclables out by separating them. This is an important revenue stream. Such systems can be quite extensive; and can range from $1 million to $8 million depending on what the customer wants to do.

Donovan points out its ability to go from a single unit to a complete, specifically designed, engineered system, whether it’s to fit into an existing building or to design a system and build a structure around it. “Every project, every market is different,” says Donovan. “The questions typically asked are: What material do you have? How much do you want to process per hour per day? What do you want to do with it? What do you want to claim from it? This is not a place for a cookie-cutter mentality. We started out building grizzly mills to service sawmills. But there are a lot more markets out there now.”

CBI is especially proud of its horizontal chipper’s ability to make a quarter-inch chip for pellet manufacturers. It is able to take pulp logs and chip them down to the quarter-inch chip length on the first pass, instead of having to take regular whole tree chips and grind them down in a 1,000-horsepower mill before going into a dryer and then needing another grinding on the backside of the dryer to shorten the fiber length for the pellet process. The ability to chip the fiber length short means the material doesn’t have to be ground before going into the dryer. Because the fiber length is short already, it takes a lot less horsepower on the back side to grind it down, because you are not shortening the fiber length. That takes horsepower.

“When CBI started up and received its name some 20 years ago, the word biomass wasn’t even a word anyone was really using,” adds Donovan. “The company’s Swedish founder, Anders Ragnarsson made a choice to be more proactive than reactive regarding what the future had in store for us, and that strategy has paid off.”

Shifting Gears on the Green Side of Operations
Letourneau Corp. of Freetown, MA, has three 6800T CBI grinders from the model years of 2005, 2006, and 2008, which grind all of the company’s stumps. The company grinds for municipalities and towns, and it also manufactures mulch to sell to retail and wholesale contractors.

It has had a good relationship with its CBI dealer since 2000. “In 2004, CBI’s Anders Ragnarsson told me about the 6800-T,” explains Mark Letourneau, Letourneau Corp. owner. “I also saw the 6800 in a video at ConExpo in 2004 and was so impressed that I set up a demonstration for us back at home. I ended up buying one in 2005, 2006, and finally again in 2008.”

Letourneau Corp. is a professional clearing contractor for such large projects as shopping malls or interstate highways. But at present the majority of its work is on pipeline rights of way. It cuts corridors in many different states for new natural-gas pipelines. This is where the CBI machinery comes in handy, grinding up the stumps and other debris so that the pipeline can be put in place.

“Though we don’t do C&D at present,” says Letourneau, “we do process greenwaste or land-clearing waste, which is a huge part of what CBI machines do, aside from C&D. One hundred percent of what we create goes to power plants or mulch; nothing is left on the job. It is very simple to get the particle size correct for the biomass plants. On the 6800, we simply go down to the smaller screen to produce a smaller material. I consider this the easiest, most simply designed grinder on the market by far.”

Even with the downturn in C&D processing, Letourneau has not felt an increase in competition from outfits changing gears to work more on the green side of things. “The energy world is just a small portfolio of contractors needing to meet the criteria to bid on this work anyway. When we do compete on bids, we compete with five or six very reputable contractors so that everything is very much an “˜apples to apples’ comparison when we bid.

“The downturn has affected us drastically in the commercial market. We used to clear for seven or eight building supply centers a year, several mall clearings a year as well as several subdivisions a year. We haven’t cleared for either of those in at least two years. Clearing for power lines and pipelines now form the bulk of our operations. But we’re ready to shift back to other directions should the economy pick up.”

Putting Their Teeth Into It
Bandit’s line of horizontal grinders is ideal for processing C&D waste. Nicknamed “the Beast,” these horizontal grinders process shingles, railroad ties, forest residues, and other woodwaste, and can tolerate smaller pieces of metal and contaminants. While the Beast has been known to process everything from European-style refrigerators to the hardest Australian timber, processing concrete, tires, and other such materials is not recommended. Four models are available, ranging in size from 180 horsepower up to 1,200 horsepower, and can be built as either towable or self-propelled track units.

Introduced in 1997, the design of the Beast has stayed fairly consistent. Jason Morey, marketing manager for Bandit Industries, explains, “The heart of the Beast Recycler is the patented cuttermill. This mill uses a variety of teeth, depending on the application, to cut, split, and grind the material, as opposed to the beating action of traditional hammermills, which tends to be tougher on the equipment. “We like to compare it to cutting down a tree: Would you rather use an axe, or a hammer? When you think of it that way, the choice is clear.”

Because the cuttermill design has proved to be so effective across a wide range of applications, Bandit has been able to implement innovative design concepts with ease. By installing chipper knives on the head of the Beast, the machine can be used to process fairly clean material for generating a screened, dimensional end-product, much like a whole-tree chipper.

“Our customer base is quite diverse,” says Morey. “As the housing market declined over the past two years, so has the market for C&D recycling. The versatility of the Beast has allowed us to shift our focus to the biomass side of things, which is quite strong right now.”

The Beast equipped with chipper knives can create a product as small as one-quarter-inch-minus, which Bandit calls “bio-sawdust.” This product is proving ideal for pellet production, where a clean, miniscule chip is in high demand.

“Correct sizing of biomass fuel is an issue for pellet mills and cogeneration facilities alike, as is having a convenient, sufficient supply of raw material,” says Morey. “While it may take a few years for the housing market to take a turn for the better, we can at least say with confidence that the bioenergy and related markets are holding steady and should increase quite rapidly.”

Stimulus funding, such as the Biomass Crop Assistance Program, has assisted in getting some of the bioenergy plants throughout the nation up and running. In addition, stimulus funding has made its way into the land-clearing market. “Amtrak recently received funding from the American Recovery Act to build a new railroad,” says Morey. “We have three big chippers heading out to help clear the way.”

No Rest for Grapple Truck Equipment
Rick Speers, owner of Landworks Depot in Southwest Ranches, FL, uses his Scaffidi grapple truck equipment (a Serco 8500R) every day; and says it’s a great addition to his business. Landworks lifts greenwaste to recycle it into soils and mulches.

“We’re very well-grounded in south Florida markets and even though we’re in a recession, I really don’t see that the downturn is on track to hit us,” says Speers. “The equipment we have from Scaffidi we’ve been running for six months to a year and we’ve had absolutely nothing go wrong with it. It’s been perfect for us here in our operations.

“As far as what I can see going on out there, I feel that if anything works for people in this economy, it’s knowing how to diversify, work your customer base and pull out every resource you can with them, and stay competitive price-wise. To best service your customer, you want to do customer service first. A combination of these things in this kind of market will really keep you on your toes. That’s basically how we run our company-customer first-and we try to always remember to do things that we’ve said we are going to do. You won’t go wrong with such a strategy as that.”

Scaffidi specializes in building grapple trucks to customer’s specs and performing a loader stability test for each chassis involved. “It’s nice for a municipality to know the truck they’re using has gone through a mathematical calculation, certifying that the loader is compatible with the chassis,” says Maggie Schoenfeld, Scaffidi hydraulics marketing coordinator.

“Municipals are using the grapple trucks as a crossover, not only for waste, C&D, and bulky item pickup, but also for their parks and forestry departments,” says Brian Stanley, Scaffidi hydraulics division manager. “This is a big investment, but the communities are finding more and more ways to use them to justify the cost.”

Lots of unsafe and not particularly well-built trucks exist on the market today, according to Schoenfeld and Stanley, due mainly to the fact that these truck bodies have too much weight over each axle.

“Such trucks often are not built by original equipment manufacturers and may not be up to DOT standards or requirements,” says Stanley. “Users must remember that just because a shop put the truck together doesn’t necessarily mean that the vehicle is acceptable or the right fit for them.

The Scaffidi grapple truck division was first developed back in 2000. The grapple truck evolved from the log truck (and the serious hard work they perform), and then into other industries, including scrap-metal recycling, C&D waste, greenwaste, railroad maintenance, tree care and such construction industry uses as land clearing and delivery of precast concrete and other materials used in road construction.

“Each truck we build is custom-built to perform a specific job,” says Schoenfeld. “It’s not like we have rows and rows of grapple trucks out in front of our building. We work with customers to get to know them and the specific job their truck needs to perform. Then we set out to build the truck for the job, choosing from over 50 loader options with different lift capacities, reach, et cetera. There are choices, and the customer needs to take advantage of our expertise here. Customers have lots of input, too. They’d like their grapple truck to do multiple jobs; they need to access backyards without tearing up lawns and driveways; they prefer to keep their truck under CDL; they need to lift 1 ton…or 10 tons…the list goes on and on.”

The ability to accomplish multiple jobs is always more cost-efficient than sending one truck out for one job and another truck out for another job, according to Schoenfeld. “With a single grapple truck doing much of the work, manpower is saved; truck maintenance, insurance, and licensing fees are saved; dollars for extra equipment decrease; and, with some of the safety features included, workmen’s compensation may also be reduced.”

“I recently had a call from a city in North Carolina,” says Schoenfeld. “Their goal was not to have to job-out their tree/debris removal when storms hit. Costs can be considerable for someone to do this work for them. They wondered if a smaller truck-a single axle perhaps-in their fleet would enable them to do such clearing on their own. Our grapple truck was a good fit.”

Some Scaffidi loaders are stationary-mounted directly on the floor or concrete base. Others are placed on railcars for use by mills or are placed on trailers pulled by trucks, which are then taken to a site for use. Grapples are used for scrap metal operations, C&D transfer center operations, and more. They can be equipped with a magnet enabling them to pull up metal.

“Attachments come in thousands of varieties, depending on the individual customer’s needs,” adds Stanley. “For railroad applications, quite a few use both a magnet and a grapple attachment to do the work. Such a setup is more common than people might think.”

Schoenfeld feels if you have a fleet of rolloff trucks collecting the C&D waste that today it makes more sense than ever to incorporate a grapple truck into your fleet because of the fuel savings involved alone. One grapple truck with a large cubic-yard-debris body means one trip to the landfill, not several with traditional rolloff units.

“A grapple truck makes a real difference for cities with long commutes to their landfills,” says Schoenfeld. “Now more than ever, in a slow economic climate, the efficiency is there and the savings will accumulate.”

Pulling Out the Metal
Steinert US is in the separation equipment business, including magnetics. They’ve worked in waste energy facilities for quite a long time. They separate out of residual ash the remaining metals using eddy current systems, overband magnets, magnetic head pulleys and tramp magnets.

Steinert has a lot of sensor-based and optical-based sorting equipment. “During our operations the equipment either shreds the material first and then runs it over their equipment, or in some cases, if it’s already smaller-fraction sizes of the material, C&D facilities actually run over it with their equipment first to pull the metals out and then send the metal up the line,” explains Jason Looman, Steinert US president. “Operational setups depend somewhat upon the philosophy of the OEM that built the facility as well as what the shredders are capable of doing.

In October 2009 Steinert acquired RTT, a company very prominent in the waste industry in Europe. In November, 2009 Steinert moved from Clearwater, FL, to Cincinnati, OH. Earlier, its focus had been on the scrap-metal market. But the move has happened with the intent of focusing more on serving the waste market and introducing the company’s products in that setting.

“Our focus at Steinert US is North America,” explains Looman. “And one of the things we looked at coming into the business was where the best location for us might be. The book Who’s Your City?, by Richard Florida, was helpful in making our decision.”

After looking at the industrial centers of the US, the company discovered Cincinnati fit perfectly. The city lies in the middle of many US and Canadian markets. With waste being much more a major player in its business it is now far more centralized to the company’s markets than when it was in Clearwater.

“The waste market is new to us,” adds Looman. “In the scrap market everyone saw a downturn but that seems to be picking back up. I can’t%