CMRA supports the growing construction and demolition recycling industry
Submitted by CMRAThe Construction Materials Recycling Association (CMRA) is a national 501c3 non-profit organization that promotes the recycling of construction and demolition (C&D) materials. Everyone is pretty aware of the recycling they can do at home - the cans, bottles, and paper they might put in that blue bin next to the garbage at the end of the driveway or in the alley.
Our industry, however, works with concrete, asphalt wood, metals, cardboard, gypsum drywall and asphalt shingles - all very heavy materials that make up a large part of the North American waste stream. Indeed, the CMRA estimates that about 350 million tons of C&D is generated in the US alone each year. By point of comparison, municipal solid waste - the material generated from homes and offices - is about 225 million tons per year. C&D materials come from two main infrastructure sources: building-related, and road and bridgework. The latter is almost exclusively concrete, asphalt and metals, while the former can include just about anything you can find in a building.
They say that recycling doesn’t make any money, and there are challenges, especially today, for paper, plastics and some metals as far as finding markets. But C&D recycling makes a lot of dollars and sense, besides the good feeling of knowing its positive effect on the environment. Let’s take the recycling of concrete on a road project as an example. The old concrete is ripped up from the road. In the old days it would be transported to a landfill and disposed, while new aggregate would be hauled over a distance from the quarry to serve as a roadbase on the new road.
Today, the road contractor can set up a portable crushing and screening system right near the site (or utilize a nearby stationary crushing operation) to process that concrete into a roadbase product, or even into aggregate for new concrete. This saves on disposal fees and on trucking costs to the landfill and from the quarry, not to mention the environmental benefits of fewer trucks on the road, and less congestion, air pollution, and wear and tear on the roads. In addition, recycled concrete can sell for a couple of dollars a ton less than virgin aggregate and, on a 40,000-ton job, that adds up quickly. Some of the savings can be passed on to the customer, which is often a state or local highway authority.
Concrete is not the only material heavily recycled in the road environment; asphalt is often reused in new hot mixes of asphalt. Almost all road asphalt road projects nowadays contain some recycled asphalt in the new mix.
It’s obvious that building-related C&D is a bit more challenging to recycle. The material can either be source separated at the jobsite or, more commonly, thrown into one Dumpster and hauled to an off-site facility where it is sorted into more homogeneous piles for further processing into end products. Some examples of materials and end uses include wood as a biomass or as infeed to panelboard manufacturing; asphalt shingles that can go to hot mix asphalt or dust control; and gypsum drywall as a beneficial land use application for agriculture or made back into new wallboard.
The voice of recyclers
The CMRA’s role in all this is to provide an information exchange so that this rapidly growing but still highly-fragmented industry has a central place to share ideas and issues. Currently, no one entity controls more than one percent of the C&D recycling capacity in the United States. To help advocate on behalf of this spread out market, a related association, the CMRA Issues & Education Fund, was formed as a 501c6 organization to advocate on behalf of the recyclers. CMRA I&E works at the local, state and federal level to present the viewpoints of C&D recyclers to regulators and legislators.
You might think that with today’s emphasis on green building and the environment that C&D recyclers would have smooth sailing. Far from it. For example, while a state environmental agency might push and even require the recycling of C&D materials, another section of the agency might be putting such stringent controls and regulations on recyclers and their markets that it almost becomes uneconomical or even impossible to recycle. This is why the CMRA I&E was formed.
The CMRA is an inclusive group made up of the processors of the material, demolition and construction contractors, waste haulers, end users of the products, consultants and vendors to the industry. We have an Annual Meeting every year, and the next one is March 22-24, 2010, at the Rio in Las Vegas. For more information on individual materials discussed in this Foreword, visit www.shinglerecycling.org; www.concreterecycling.org, and www.drywallrecycling.org.
View Digital Corporate Profile of CMRA in Construction Digital September 2009