The awards were presented at the 10th Annual School Recycling Conference.

The Northeast Resource Recycling Association (NRRA), Epsom, New Hampshire, along with the New Hampshire the Beautiful and NRRA’s School Recycling CLUB presented nine awards to teachers, students, staff and schools that have started, expanded or sustained their school recycling programs. The awards were presented during the 10th Annual School Recycling Conference on May 21 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Manchester Downtown Hotel in Manchester, New Hampshire.

“We are committed to supporting and recognizing the recycling efforts of schools,” says Michael Durfor, NRRA executive director. “NRRA knows students are tomorrow’s recyclers, consumers and environmental leaders. Sustainable school recycling programs depend on students, teachers and facility staff all working in concert. Through its innovative ‘Town and Gown’ recycling program, NRRA helps bring schools and the town transfer facilities together to increase recycling and reduce costs. The NRRA School Recycling CLUB also recognized 9-year-old Ryan Hickman of California and 16-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden for her School Strike 4 Climate initiative. Both of their programs exemplify the difference that one student can make in the world.”

The following individuals or schools received awards: 

• NH the Beautiful School Recycling Innovation Award ($500) – Principal Owen Harrington of Dunbarton Elementary School in Dunbarton, New Hampshire

• Best Composter Award – John Stevens of Somersworth Middle School in Somersworth, New Hampshire

• Individual Rookie Recycler of the Year – Alex Kittridge of White Mountains Regional School District #36 in Whitfield, New Hampshire

• School Rookie Recycler of the Year – Mountain Village Charter School in Plymouth, New Hampshire

• Outstanding Community Involvement – Jessie Jennings of Plymouth Recycling Center in Plymouth, New Hampshire

• Facilities Staff Recycler of the Year – Larry Hewey of Loudon Elementary School in Loudon, New Hampshire

• Teacher Recycler of the Year – Stephen Fitzgerald of Nashua High School North in Nashua, New Hampshire

• Special Recognition Award – Ryan Hickman of Ryan’s Recycling in California

• Special Recognition Award – Greta Thunberg of School Strike 4 Climate in Sweden

NRRA’s School Recycling CLUB is a nonprofit group that assists K-12 schools in implementing, maintaining and improving recycling programs. 

Construction & Demolition Recycling Inc. has embraced the challenge of interior demolition recycling to create a new model for diversion.

Large-scale commercial demolition projects and building teardowns often lend themselves to straightforward recycling opportunities for contractors. High-volume materials, like concrete and wood, and high-value materials, like metal, are systematically cherrypicked from sites and subsequently recycled. But what happens when a demolition contractor generates materials that aren’t easily processed through traditional recycling methods? That was the challenge facing the team at South Gate, California-based Interior Removal Specialist (IRS) Demo as its business picked up steam over a decade ago. Looking for a better way to divert interior debris from landfill and meet local recycling ordinances, the IRS team decided to start its own recycling business, Construction & Demolition Recycling Inc. (CDR Inc.), which received its first solid waste facility permit in 2007.

“We didn’t have a choice if we wanted to meet the requirements of cities like Santa Monica and Pasadena that had a 50-percent diversion mandate for these demolition jobs at the time,” says Richard Ludt, the director of environmental affairs for CDR Inc. “The only thing we could do was start a facility that targeted the materials we were hauling.”

CDR Inc.’s seven-acre processing facility is headed up by Ludt and Vicky Herrera, the company’s corporate officer and field operations manager. It is the only construction and demolition (C&D) facility in California that solely recycles tenant improvement demolition debris.

While the facility is permitted to take in 3,000 tons per day (TPD) at full capacity, Ludt says the company is only processing between 250-300 TPD currently. However, he expects that to change soon. CDR Inc. recently obtained hauler permits in many of its surrounding cities that will allow it to better serve the C&D management needs of area contractors. With these permits in place, Ludt says the facility is poised to increase its incoming tonnage.

“We have broken away from being a recycling facility that just serves one customer,” Ludt says. “We have become a fully independent facility with our own dumpster rental, hauling and collection operations.”

Though the composition of its incoming material stream fluctuates, CDR Inc. presently enjoys a 79 percent diversion rate. The facility diversion breakdown averages are as follows: 27 percent drywall, 14 percent metals, 13 percent wood, 10 percent carpet, 9 percent concrete, 4 percent ceiling tiles and 1 percent each of cardboard and salvaged/donated items. Only 21 percent of outgoing material is trash or contaminated material.

To process its recyclables, CDR Inc. relies on a portable sort line from the Québec-based Sherbrooke OEM and a trommel from Crystal Lake, Illinois-based Tuffman Equipment. Ludt says CDR Inc. favors a more low-tech approach via manual sorting to avoid crushing incoming drywall, which accounts for the largest percentage of its incoming material. However, Ludt says CDR Inc. is presently weighing the benefits of adding new equipment to better sort its incoming cardboard, plastics and glass.

Like most C&D recyclers, Ludt says that finding end markets is one of the company’s biggest challenges. To meet its needs, CDR Inc. relies on a network of customers.

“We’re very lucky in California that the soil needs gypsum. We’re shipping 1,200 tons of gypsum every month to farmers to use in [agriculture], so that takes care of 30 percent of our inbound material right there,” Ludt says. “Most of the wood we’re getting is going to waste-to-energy use because almost all of it is manufactured lumber, although we do donate the small percentage of dimensional lumber we do get from public loads to various beneficial reuse projects. We’re also very fortunate in that a lot of the carpet we get is carpet tile. Because we have the ability to keep it clean in our warehouse, we donate tens of thousands of square feet of carpet every year to nonprofits that reuse it in places like homeless shelters, children’s centers and battered women’s shelters. As for our fines, we had been using them for cover for a while, and then we cleaned them up enough that they were going for [agricultural] uses for non-human consumption crops because they’re predominantly gypsum-based coming out of our facility, but now, they’re getting mostly used for road stabilization. Even then, fines make up less than 10 percent of our weight.”

Beyond recycling and reusing material, Ludt says CDR Inc. has established a robust donation program. Because of the company’s focus on commercial interior work, CDR Inc. receives a lot of gently used furniture from companies that are moving offices or undergoing renovations.

“When we get furniture that’s still in good shape, we have a program to repurpose it. We have a 100,000-square-foot warehouse, so we’re putting that furniture in the warehouse and we’re making it available to any nonprofit that wants it,” Ludt says. “We’re currently donating anywhere from 30 to 60 tons of furniture and fixtures every month. Everyone from dog rescue centers to the Church of Scientology to fire departments has access to our goods. As long as it can go to somebody that needs it, it would be criminal to let this really expensive furniture go to the landfill.”

Specializing in interior demolition recycling isn’t an easy vocation. Beyond familiar challenges in finding end markets, the nature of the projects that generate CDR Inc.’s incoming materials often make it difficult for source separation.

“The biggest issue with commercial interior demolition as far as diversion—and I don’t care who is doing the demo work—is the fact that most high-rise buildings in the California market only have room for one dumpster in the loading dock, so you can’t do a lot of source separation,” Ludt says. “That creates a challenge, because we all know the easiest way to keep materials clean is to have a separate box per material. But that doesn’t work in a commercial high-rise. On a larger scale job, it gets a little bit easier. But on a smaller scale job, if you’re only doing 5,000 or 8,000 square feet of demo, then you have no choice but to put all the material in one box, and it’s difficult to keep those materials clean enough to divert.”

While Ludt acknowledges there are less challenging ways to make a buck, he says pushing the envelope of what can be diverted is part of the company’s DNA.

“At the end of the day, we’ve kind of made it tough on ourselves just to prove [diverting this material] can be done,” Ludt says. “If disposal is $35-$40 per ton, processing is $50-$70 a ton and you’re bringing in $90-$100 a ton at the gate depending on what facility you’re at, you can make it make financial sense, but it’s hard when we’re going up against people who own landfills or have more traditional C&D commodities.

“We do have the advantage that we’re in California and there is legislation that mandates a certain level of recycling,” Ludt adds. “Moving forward, the state, Los Angeles County and the city of Los Angeles all have some pretty aggressive zero-waste plans they’re aiming for, which puts us in a good position. If the state, county and the cities are serious about zero waste, then eventually everybody is going to have to start looking at recycling commercial interior debris the same way we do.”

Ludt says CDR Inc. doesn’t just strive to divert material from landfill to comply with local regulations. The company does it because it’s the right thing to do for both the community and the environment.

“We could make more money doing it an easier way. We could drop the price of concrete inbound to our facility and we could bring in tons and tons of concrete and wood and not have to process so much of that interior debris and increase our profit,” he says. “But one of the things we say around the yard is once you know the damage this stuff can cause, you can’t unknow. Once you know what drywall or manufactured lumber does when it gets into the landfill and all of those chemicals turn into harmful gases or get down to the leachate that is only being kept out of the groundwater by a plastic liner that has, at best, a 50-year warranty—how can you knowingly put this material in a landfill?”

CDR Inc.’s efforts to change the way C&D material is recycled hasn’t gone unnoticed. According to Ludt, the company is currently the only C&D facility in southern California to garner Recycling Certification Institute (RCI) certification, making it the only facility in the region eligible to provide the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) LEED pilot point for facilities with third-party verification. Additionally, the facility has been singled out on the awards circuit as of late. In just the last six months, CDR Inc. has won the Sustainable Materials Management Award from the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), the Recycler of the Year Award from the Construction & Demolition Recycling Association (CDRA), and the Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award (GEELA) from the state of California, which is the highest environmental honor in the state.

“In the space of six months, we have been recognized by the state, internationally through SWANA and called out specifically within the C&D recycling industry with the CDRA award, so that’s kind of like the holy trinity in this industry—the word’s getting out,” Ludt says. “It’s nice to know that somebody gets it because it does get frustrating to be doing it right and sometimes feeling like we’re the only ones who are, and I know that’s not the case—there are other good people out there. But to get that recognition that somebody understands that what we’re doing has some meaning. That means a lot to us.

The author is the editor for Construction & Demolition Recycling magazine and can be contacted at aredling@gie.net.

The city began installing an underground waste collection system downtown May 28.

A new initiative coming to downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, aims to keep sidewalks clean and save space, time and money.

Raleigh’s oldest streets were built without alleys, and the trash and recycling carts lining its sidewalks have long been an issue for pedestrians. According to the city, the containers smell, restrict access and were identified as the top concern in a 2018 downtown cleanliness survey.

To help alleviate the problem, the city began installing an underground waste collection system May 28.

The pilot project includes six new high-capacity containers from Ontario, Canada-based Molok North America to collect trash, mixed recycling and cardboard. The containers will turn a no-parking zone into the first municipal installation of its kind in the United States.

“It’s very exciting for us that Raleigh is the first city in the country to adopt this underground storage model,” Raleigh Solid Waste Services Director Stan Joseph says. “It’s a simple concept using innovative technology. The bottom line is that we want to improve quality of life—and part of that is getting garbage carts off the sidewalks and away from neighbors and visitors enjoying downtown.”

Each of the new semi-underground Molok containers will hold the equivalent of approximately 20 carts, providing potential cost savings and reducing environmental impacts.

Six days a week, city crews pick up the traditional rolling carts twice a day. They also collect once Sunday. Businesses are required to pull the carts to the curb and back again, which requires staff time to manage.

“This should greatly reduce the overall amount of time our trucks spend on the street, a benefit for cars, pedestrians and our downtown crew’s safety,” Joseph says.

The city’s Solid Waste Services department will monitor fullness levels and handle collections, using a retrofitted knuckleboom truck with a hook to serve as a cost-effective crane to manage the large containers.

The city’s Sustainability Fund, created by Raleigh’s City Council to fund innovation and sustainability projects, provided funding to purchase the containers and modify the truck. The pilot project falls under the city’s Strategic Plan Growth & Natural Resources Objective 3, which aims to “optimize public infrastructure projects to address community resiliency, sustainability and efficiency.”

“This is an exciting collaboration between several city departments as well as the community,” Raleigh Sustainability Manager Megan Anderson says. “The Sustainability Fund Committee is enthusiastic in its support of this innovative project.”

A partnership between Raleigh Arts, the Department of Transportation, and Molok North America created an opportunity to wrap the three recycling containers in artwork commissioned by three local artists: Autumn Cobeland, Lincoln Hancock and Jermaine Powell.

The city encourages downtown businesses to give up their 95-gallon trash and recycling rolling carts for the June 2019–May 2020 pilot period. Waste collection fees are not affected by pilot participation.

The shredded wood from the demonstration will be used for ground cover.

Weima, an industrial shredding and briquette press manufacturer with U.S. headquarters in Fort Mill, South Carolina, will be demonstrating its WLK13 single-shaft shredder during the Association of Woodworking & Furnishing Suppliers (AWFS) Fair July 17-20 in Las Vegas.

The demonstration will have a greater purpose than just showing off the technology. The machine will be shredding the wood waste that is generated on the show floor and recycled for ground cover.

Staff from Freeman Co., which is organizing the event, will collect the wood scrap on the show floor and bring it to the shredder, where it will be sorted.

The solid wood material from the show floor will be shredded and used as ground cover around the Las Vegas campus of the University of Nevada. The laminate, particle board and other pressed wood with glue or treated with chemicals will not be used as ground cover and will instead be disposed of in other ways.

The partnership is a collaboration between Weima, AWFS, Freeman, Las Vegas, and Repurpose America, a nonprofit based in Henderson, Nevada, that focuses on education surrounding sustainability.

“The thing I like most about this program is that we’re able to give back something beautiful and eco-friendly to the city of Las Vegas, who hosts this tradeshow each year,” says Audrey Brewer, the marketing manager for Weima. “We couldn’t do what we do without the participation of the other exhibitors on the show floor who also partner with us by saving their scrap to be shredded. Destroying Responsibly is a show-wide team effort.”

Weima can be found in booths #8914 and #8116, as well as behind the tradeshow hall.

Pollution and chemicals issues are causing two United Nations conventions to tighten their requirements on how plastic is used and discarded.

The Basel Convention and Stockholm Convention, both affiliated with the United Nations, are codifying global concerns about the use and recycling of plastic, according to panelists at the International Environment Council (IEC) meeting of the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR). The Brussels-based BIR held its 2019 World Recycling Convention in May in Singapore.

IEC Chairman Olivier Francois of Belgium-based Galloo, said the two conventions and the agencies that oversee them were created because “there were a lot of transboundary shipments [of potentially hazardous materials] from developed countries to developing nations; it was a very problematic situation in the 1980s.”

Now, however, the Basel Convention is taking steps to classify plastic scrap as a hazardous waste, pointing to the presence of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and other chemicals found in some plastics. The Stockholm Convention was created in large part to regulate materials containing chemicals labeled as persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Currently, the convention is seeking to add several BFRs to its POPs list.

A presentation by BIR Trade & Environment Director Ross Bartley said the presence of discarded plastic in the world’s oceans and natural environment—and graphic images of birds and aquatic life choking on plastic—have helped spur the two conventions into seeking stricter regulations on the global plastic scrap trade.

Changes to the Basel Convention would place restrictions on plastic scrap flows from developed nations (those belonging to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD) to developing countries. Most OECD nations are signatories to the convention, with the exception of the United States.

Bartley said some of the definitions and terms have been finalized, leaving questions as to which particular materials will be affected, or even how a “recycling operator” is defined. What is clear, said Bartley, is the Basel Convention intends to “minimize transboundary movements” of plastic scrap, and that shipments deemed illegal will be “treated as criminal” activity.

Additionally, the Basel Convention’s proposed Plastic Waste Partnership and Household Waste Partnership are attempts to codify how recyclable materials are collected in signatory nations. Bartley said the recycling industry “has to be included” in this conversation, to help protect “high-quality scrap that can go to a consuming destination.” The fear of Bartley and others pertains to an ongoing dialogue at the 2019 BIR Convention relative to the mislabeling of recyclable materials as “waste.”

The Stockholm Convention, meanwhile, is adding to its list of POPs, potentially more than doubling its list from 12 to 28 chemicals. Several of the proposed additions have been used as flame retardants or additives in commonly recycled items.

Should plastics containing traces of these chemicals be declared nonrecyclable, Bartley said it will pose a contradiction to the recycling targets set by the European Union and in other nations, especially for waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) and for end-of-life vehicles (ELVs).

POPs are gaining attention as a problem, said Bartley, with some politicians even having taken blood tests to find that these chemicals can indeed be found in their own blood and body tissue. “The politicians are engaged in this,” he stated. “We’re in a difficult position as recyclers. We’ve really got to be on the right side of this argument,” he cautioned.

Also at the IEC meeting, Gloria Yao of the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (HKRITA) provided an overview of that organization’s efforts to upgrade and expand mechanical and chemical processes to recycle discarded apparel and fabric.

Yao said retailers and garment makers (including Sweden-based H&M) are helping to fund the research, which includes a Garment-to-Garment (G2G) pilot plant that creates usable fabric yarn from discarded clothing. HKRITA describes the G2G pilot, located in the New Territories of Hong Kong, as “a mini production line that recycles post-consumer garments into clean and wearable clothes.”

Other processes being researched by HKRITA involve biological and hydrothermal treatment processes designed to create end products such as cellulose powder and polyester plastic resin products.

The 2019 BIR World Recycling Convention & Exhibition was held May 19-22 at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore.