Purposeful planning

In the construction and demolition (C&D) recycling industry, every operation is different. From legislation and permitting to end markets and incoming material streams, each facility is uniquely attuned to its regional markets.

Troy Lautenbach, president of Lautenbach Recycling and a longtime officer of the Construction & Demolition Recycling Association (CDRA), Chicago, moderated an operations-focused session discussing the different aspects of running a recycling plant at this year’s C&D World convention in Bonita Springs, Florida. Lautenbach Recycling, based in Mount Vernon, Washington, is a 30-year-old, family-owned C&D recycling company serving northwest Washington.

In addition to a C&D material recovery facility (MRF) at the company’s headquarters, Lautenbach Recycling operates a processing facility for residential recyclables, a transfer station on San Juan Island and a depackaging plant for organics. The company offers demolition, roll-off, transportation, self-haul recycling, metal recycling and organic waste processing services.

Simplified approach

Lautenbach Recycling, which has roots dating back to 1991, has kept its C&D processing operations relatively simple since its founding and largely relies on manual sorting. Lautenbach says that while the facility is “pretty low-tech,” he’s been exploring more automated solutions, a topic of conversation during the operations panel.

“Part of the forum [was] to … ask some of my colleagues across the nation what kind[s] of things went into their decisions around upgrading or buying equipment, whether it’s presorting to A and B lines, to screening equipment and then, of course, how they made the decisions to do that sort of thing.”

Lautenbach Recycling’s C&D facility uses a processing system from Bellingham, Washington-based Krause Manufacturing, which the company purchased from a now-closed C&D landfill. The system includes a trommel screen, drum separator and fines screen. Traditional C&D materials, such as wood, aggregate, plastic, cardboard and metals, are sorted using the mechanical system, and sheetrock is pulled off and placed into containers.

Roughly six to eight employees identify and manually sort materials before an excavator loads the remaining materials onto the sorting line.

“It’s pretty rudimentary, but it’s pretty effective, as well,” he says.

Following the market

In the Pacific Northwest, Lautenbach says, aggregate is cheap and the market for smaller aggregates, such as 2-inch minus and 4-inch minus, is not great. With no stable end markets, he says the company has hesitated to invest in more screens but isn’t completely opposed to the idea.

Wood is the predominant building material used in the region and makes up the majority of Lautenbach Recycling’s material stream.

“When you take a house down, it’s mostly wood that’s coming out of there—the vast majority of it. And we have good markets for wood still, and we’re actually still developing more markets,” Lautenbach says.

In addition to paying attention to commodity markets, the company must be selective about the loads it accepts from contractors. Loads from new construction, for example, will sometimes contain hazardous materials or nonrecyclable products, such as composite decking or engineered wood siding.

Soft demos and tenant improvement projects can bring in undesirable materials, as well.

To control the amount of contamination in inbound loads, Lautenbach Recycling’s demolition business prioritizes effectively managing recyclables.

He says the better the front-end demolition is, “the easier it is for us to recycle it when it gets to our facility. Not a lot of dirt and fines, things like that, get put into the [loads] as they’re doing the demolition.”

Lautenbach Recycling has operated its demolition business since the 1990s, and it’s given the company a competitive advantage in a sometimes-sparse marketplace.

“We don’t have a huge marketplace where we are, so we’re always trying to get more material. … Before we even owned an excavator, we would rent an excavator and go out and demo a building and then sort [the material],” Lautenbach says.

“It’s evolved to where we’ve got some highly specialized equipment to take care of the demolition,” he says of the company’s demolition business currently. “We have a couple [of] operators [who] can take apart a building and literally leave the foundation, or leave a wall up, all with an excavator.”

Maintaining efficiency

In addition to skilled equipment operators, Lautenbach Recycling works closely with personnel at its C&D MRF to communicate recycling goals.

Lautenbach says the company monitors tonnages and recycling rates to capture the economic viability of the overall operation. The facility also is designed to efficiently separate materials as they move through the system, right down to the residual materials.

“We designed our facility so that our residuals drop right into the intermodal container that goes to the landfill. So, it doesn’t drop into a pile and then we have to reload that into a truck—it just drops right into the residual trailer,” Lautenbach says.

Metal and wood also are sorted out of the system to be further processed. Metal will sometimes be reloaded for further separation, and wood is pushed underneath the sort line to a woodpile, where it is dried for use as biomass.

According to Lautenbach, the Lautenbach Recycling C&D MRF processes approximately 1,200 to 1,500 tons per month of mixed C&D debris.

Working together

Looking forward, Lautenbach says he plans to explore the benefits of further automating the processing line at the C&D MRF.

“Let’s say you spend some money … to buy a piece of equipment to pull more material out—the obvious thing you have to have is a market for that material,” he says.

Lautenbach says organizations like the CDRA have been a valuable resource to better understand certain factors and markets influencing the C&D recycling industry.

“When we get together as a group, we talk about what’s happening in different marketplaces across the nation,” he says. “And it’s a very sharing group, and I would say [the CDRA] is the first place that you go to [to ask], ‘What are you doing in Florida? What are you doing in the Midwest? What are you doing in the Northeast?’”

He adds that CDRA members share feedback on new technologies aimed toward more efficient processing of materials, such as asphalt, gypsum, wood, shingles and concrete.

“There’s a lot of engineering-type of activities out there, with people trying to develop new things,” Lautenbach says. “And when that happens, connect with them and possibly help them develop that and the manufacturing of those materials, and then work backward from there.”

This article originally appeared in the January-February issue of Construction & Demolition Recycling, a sister publication of Waste Today. The author is associate editor of Waste Today and can be reached at at hrischar@gie.net.