Update on the shingle recycling saga. We were able to get the $18 rate for our second half-ton load – victory! But even though I’d gotten written approval and surrendered my credit card info beforehand, it took another two hours at the landfill to get it all sorted out.
Every citizen should take a trip to the landfill, just to see in living color what happens to all of our stuff.
The 120-acre Dem-Con facility opened in 1985 to take construction and demolition debris and “conserve airspace” from the metro area's municipal mixed solid waste landfills, according to the glossy brochure we picked up waiting for approval to dump our humble load.
Their landfill has a capacity of 13 million cubic yards, and, low and behold, 7 million remains. That’s about 20 years of use.
Necessity, that mother of invention, sent the company to thinking about recycling. That, and the fact that they can make some money on the commodities market for metals. But Dem-Con says that builders started asking them to recycle as well.
Chris and I sat outside the sorting warehouse and watched trucks back into the building and dump their construction scrap. Pretty cool operation.
Shingle recycling is new. They get ground up on site and used in hot asphalt road mix. Dem-Con claims it’s saving “tens of thousands of cubic yards of landfill space” and reducing dependence on virgin oil used to make the asphalt.
For consumers, the operation clearly yet doesn’t live up to the company’s mission of “delivering options for contractors and the general public to recycle and recover materials they wish to discard.”
But in the end, we prevailed in our mission to keep the Loveless shingles out of the landfill. And learned a heckuva lot in the process. |
| That's the grinder in the background. |
No comments:
Post a Comment