AGC Brochure: Recycle This!

ASSOCIATED GENERAL CONTRACTORS OF AMERICA AGC Members Give Recycling a New Name 1 t’s one thing (and a very good thing at that) to do Thanks for the Memories 2 your part for the environment It’s Not Getting Older, It’s Getting Better 4 by recycling. Recycling news- papersI saves trees. Giving those alu- Recycling Goes High-Tech 7 minum cans and glass bottles On the Road Again 8 another spin makes for some lonely landfills. Every little bit counts. Back to the Future with Wood 11 Add your recycling efforts to what some Associated General Contractors (AGC) members are All or Nothing 13 doing and you’ll discover a whole lot of recycling CONTENTS going on. The construction industry as a whole re- cycles more material than any other industry. All it takes is one major commercial construction project to generate a good hundred thousand tons of re- Anything our industry can do to help our cyclable debris. Steel, concrete, asphalt and wood are all fair game. New technology, creative “ environment will give a lasting affect for thinking, and concerns for the environment pull to- generations to come. gether to make recycling just another part of the Mark Millich, President” day on construction job sites everywhere. JM Olson Corporation Look around any construction site and you will see Greater Detroit Chapter, Inc. Board of Directors an opportunity to recycle many of the materials around you. More contractors are recycling on-site, saving money on landfill fees, new materials, and even wear and tear on trucks taking waste to the landfill. Construction recycling goes much farther and tackles much larger amounts of material than everyday recycling. AGC MEMBERS GIVE RECYCLING A NEW NAME RECYCLING JUST MAKES SENSE. • It’s great for the environment. Recycling saves natural resources and reduces waste by as much as 75 percent per construction project. • It’s cost effective. No landfill fees and fewer expenses for new raw materials. It pays off where any construction business feels it most — the bottom line. • It creates new business. The recycling market can produce 10 times more jobs in the industry for the same cost as sending the waste to the landfill. Read on to find out what an imploding football stadium, an abandoned airport, the 2002 Winter Olympics, and a new twist on an old power source have in common. PAGE 1 THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES ince 1976, Seattle’s Kingdome was ground zero for some of the area’s most exciting professional sports action. Home to both the Seattle Seahawks and the Seattle Mariners, the Kingdome was where thousands of loyal fans spent many a sunny spring day and crisp Sfall afternoon cheering on their favorite teams. Nearly every nook and cranny of the Kingdome was put to good use. Stadium furnishings were either donated to local soup kitchens and other nonprofit groups or removed and auctioned off in order to raise money for the King County Parks and Recreation Department. A crew of more than 150 people spent long weeks stripping the roof (which could not be recycled because of adhesives and composite design) and gutting the interior of the building of any materials that would “contaminate” the recycling effort. After the dust from the explosion settled, an army of massive excava- tors and bulldozers moved in to process the structure. Armed with It took less than 20 seconds for all First and Goal attachments ranging from huge of that to change. The day was breakers and shears to pulverizers March 26, 2000. It was a beauti- Long before the blast, Dallas-based and buckets, this heavy equipment ful Sunday morning. One minute Turner Construction Company, the was used to chew up the rubble the stadium was standing guard Public Stadium Authority, and the into one- to two-foot boulders and over the Seattle skyline, the next it stadium’s owner/operator First and separate incredible amounts of was reduced to a pile of nearly Goal, Inc. had teamed up to put rebar. The steel and rebar was 150,000 tons of rubble. Was it an plans for a rigorous recycling plan loaded into trucks and taken off earthquake? The act of some in motion. Their goal was to site to be processed and recycled. deranged fan? No, it was the well- recycle upwards of 85 – 90 percent The smaller, more manageable planned and successfully executed of the waste generated by the material was sorted with concrete, implosion of the largest enclosed demolition and the new construc- asphalt, and masonry which was space ever attempted. tion of the Washington State Football/Soccer Stadium. combined and ground down to one CASE STUDY FACTS Key Players The Project The Results Turner Construction Public Stadium Demolish Seattle’s 97 percent of the recycled into the Company, one of the Authority, and the Kingdome to make project waste or over new stadium and nation’s largest stadium’s owner/ room for a new a hundred thousand over $3,000,000 general building operator First and exhibition center, tons of wood, was saved in companies and long- Goal, Inc. football/soccer concrete, steel, and materials, time AGC member, stadium, and parking other construction removal, and along with Seattle’s garage. materials were landfill costs. PAGE 2 A New Twist on Trash Some Facts About Steel... When all was said and done, a total of 128,250 tons of waste was All Steel is Recycled Steel! generated by the stadium project. Long before recycling became the “in” Of this, only 3,420 tons were sent thing to do, recycling was an integral to a landfill. The rest, a remarkable part of the steelmaking process. It 124,830 tons, was either reused in saves energy and natural resources and it lowers the cost of producing the new structures or recycled off- new steel. Concrete and rebar ready to be processed. site. As a result, Turner Construc- tion and its partners were not only Steel… and a half inches minus gravel with able to perform a great service to Strong a rock crusher and screen that had the local community of Seattle and Durable been set up on-site. the surrounding environment, but Stable The Big Crunch also saved a tremendous amount of money — an estimated $3,050,000 The building material of choice for commercial construction. The recycling process itself re- — along the way. sembled a “super-sized” curbside Did You Know… The demolition of the Kingdome recycling program. Turner Con- 1 and construction of the new Wash- Recycling steel: struction provided containers with ington State Football/Soccer • Saves enough energy annually to different labels for workers to Stadium represents a shift in electrically power 18 million deposit certain materials. The homes for an entire year. mentality to more efficient building difference was one of scale. Instead • Saves 2,500 pounds of ore, 1,400 practices that are becoming an of plastic bins, 40 cubic yard pounds of coal and 120 pounds of important focus in the construc- limestone per ton of steel. dumpsters labeled “wood,” “steel,” tion, architecture, and engineering “concrete,” “gypsum/drywall,” and • Accounted for 63 percent of the industries. There’s no two ways total amount of steel used for “trash” were set up in various about it — an environmentally construction projects in 1999. locations around the site. Crews of sound project that cuts construc- Recycled Steel is workers sorted through the rubble tion costs is a good deal all the way Everywhere! and loaded materials into appropri- around. You’ll find recycled steel in: ate containers. • Appliances Since the grade of the new stadium • Bridges had to be raised to accommodate • Cans the higher elevation of the new • Cars & Trucks playing surface, the on-site rock crushing operation proved itself to • Construction equipment be a pivotal part of the recycling • Office equipment • Fire hydrants effort. Much effort and expense The on-site rock crushing operation used in was spared by using the huge Turner’s immense recycling project. • Guard rails supply of gravel (some 90,000 • Residential and commercial tons) processed from recycled gravel About the author: Brian Polis is an as- construction materials at the project site. This strategy sistant superintendent at Turner • Road signs alone saved Seattle’s streets and Construction’s Seattle office. He’s been …and all of them can be recycled over roads upwards of 4,500 trips by assigned to the Stadium and Exhibition and over again! trucks and trailers — easing local Hall/Parking Garage Project since 1999. 1 Steel Recycling Institute. traffic congestion and helping to For more information, contact: maintain air quality, as well as Turner Construction Company cutting construction costs by 221 South King Street eliminating the need to move this Seattle, Washington 98104 material on- and off-site. 206.694.1400 (phone) [email protected] (email) PAGE 3 IT’S NOT GETTING OLDER, IT’S GETTING BETTER enver’s Stapleton International Airport opened in 1929 and by the time it closed 66 years later it had become one of the busiest airports in the United States. In 1995, it was replaced by the new D state-of-the-art Denver International Airport. With the new airport built in a ment of Aviation, RMC has six completely different location, years to remove concrete runways Denver officials were left with the and taxiways, averaging 24 inches challenge of revitalizing the mas- thick and covering 975 acres. sive Stapleton Airport complex. Putting this into perspective, that Plans gradually evolved to rede- is the equivalent of recycling nearly velop this valuable land into a 10,000 miles of two-lane road or “city within a city” to include highway.

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