November 17, 2008

Construct Calgary

Recycling of construction and demolition waste at Water Centre project pays off

GARTH COCHRAN

correspondent

Calgary

The construction industry and governments in Alberta are working on a new way to deal with construction and demolition waste that would reduce both costs and environmental impact.

Currently, most of it goes directly to the landfill, putting a lot of pressure on municipal facilities.

However, the City of Calgary would like to see that changed.

Putting their money where their mouth is, the city’s new Water Centre used recycling to reduce environmental impact and to earn the developer extra LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) credits.

According to Russ Golightly, a City of Calgary project manager, the project’s goals were to divert 95 per cent of the construction waste from the landfill (90 per cent was actually achieved), recycle more, use more materials with recycled content and to use locally produced materials to reduce the transportation footprint.

He was speaking during a seminar on Construction Waste Management at Construct Calgary on November 5, 2008.

Achieving success involved getting the construction crews to buy in to new ways of doing their jobs and paying attention to detail.

Records were kept on all resources brought to and from the site. Workers were trained in materials separation and keeping the streams of materials clean.

Education was provided at every level, both in concepts and procedures, as the approach was just as comprehensive as safety training.

The buy-in, Golightly reported, was remarkable.

Waste management became part of the accepted workflow and yielded a cleaner, neater and safer worksite.

As a result, all drywall waste ended up recycled into soil amendments.

Concrete waste was recycled into roadbeds.

Wood waste was recycled into mulch.

Rebar went to be recycled into more rebar, and so on.

The result was a reduced cost of disposing of the construction waste and reduced environmental impact.

Since LEED offers two points each for reuse and recycling materials and an additional two points for waste management, the procedures contributed to the centre’s LEED Gold certification.

The city is anxious to reduce the amount of materials going into the landfills as the current ones are rapidly filling up.

In 2006, there was 860,000 tonnes of construction and demolition waste.

That total was just 27 per cent of the total tonnage tipped (40 per cent is industrial and 33 per cent residential).

Calgary is considering mandating a material recovery plan as part of obtaining the building permit.

Also, now that it has proven that recycling works, the city plans to increase tipping fees at its landfills to $95 per tonne by 2011.

This will encourage contractors to utilize the lower cost facilities of recyclers such as Alberta Waste & Recycling, owned by Dan Zembal.

He charges considerably less to accept construction and demolition waste materials as long as they are separated, but will charge $100 per tonne for unsorted waste.

The challenge for contractors, he said, is to keep the various material streams clean of contamination.

With construction of the average house producing about 7 tonnes of waste and commercial projects considerably more, the savings for a contractor are worth it.

As the recycling industry grows, the economics can only get better.

Meanwhile, Alberta is considering a deposit/refund system (similar to beverage containers) to encourage recycling construction and demolition waste.

Dave Whitefield, a waste reduction specialist with Alberta Environment, said that a contractor would provide an estimate of the amount of waste the project would produce, as well as a recycling plan.

A fee corresponding to amount of expected waste would be paid up front.

Whitfield said that the payoff would be a refund at the end of the project that would reflect the actual amount of material diverted from the landfill.

Careful records would have to be kept to monitor the process.

However, it has already been shown that such measures would also result in better control of materials by the contractor, thus saving both time and money.

The government plans to introduce enabling legislation at the Spring 2009 session, draft regulations in consultation with industry next summer and implement the program in 2010.

Alberta will be the first jurisdiction in Canada to introduce province-wide construction waste recycling legislation.

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