New Hanover County’s new construction and demolition recycling facility is starting to pay dividends that ultimately could benefit the county in many ways, officials and facility users say.

The $1.8 million facility, which officially opened July 7 on U.S. 421, will keep waste from construction and demolition projects (C&D) out of the landfill, thereby extending the landfill’s life, according to New Hanover County Manager Chris Coudriet.

“Certainly, our over-arching goal is to preserve the life of the landfill,” he said. “The new C&D operation gives us a way to do that. It diverts 30 percent of the solid waste stream that doesn’t need to be in the landfill. There’s not much we can do about decomposing garbage, but these materials can go back into the market and be used to make new products.”

That is important because coastal counties are limited in how large their landfills can be. New Hanover’s current landfill has only two-and-a-half years of life left, Coudriet said. Between now and then, the county’s environmental management department will be preparing new cells in the landfill extension, immediately to the south of the current site.

“The big deal is: This is the only landfill we’re ever going to have. Love it or hate it, we must have a landfill for some materials. But it has a limited life, and we need to prolong that life as much as possible,” said Joe Suleyman, the county’s environmental management director.

The new $1.8 million facility is earning kudos from Pink-Trash, a local hauler.

“One-third of our business is C&D. Some of that is dirty and cannot be recycled, but between 12 and 15 percent of the total stream can be recycled, and we are keeping it out of the landfill,” said Pink-Trash CFO Shaun Kiviat.

Besides helping minimize landfill deposits, the new facility saves time and money for the hauler, Kiviat said.

“It’s been very beneficial for our construction division because it’s quicker and easier for our trucks to get in and out,” he said. “They don’t have to go to the landfill. Hopefully, it will save us some money. Trucks drive on a concrete pad that’s clean rather than driving over garbage at the landfill. Something there is always messing up our trucks and our tires.”

Having a large-capacity C&D recycling facility can yield a benefit for area builders and haulers. Kiviat said that construction companies increasingly seek LEED certification for projects and one qualifying factor is the ability to recycle building or demolition materials.

“It’s been great for our clients who are seeking LEED certification,” Kiviat said, adding that Pink-Trash’s access to the C&D facility could help it win hauling contracts for those projects.

The new facility, adjacent to the landfill itself, represents a tenfold increase in C&D recycling capacity.

“In the past, two workers would turn piles [of C&D materials] over and hand-pick recyclable materials and toss them into separate piles,” Suleyman said. “Those two employees could handle 6,000 tons of recyclables per year. But we knew from two studies we did that 30 percent, or 60,000 tons a year, of all materials going into the landfill were C&D, and we knew automation was the way to go.”

The goal for this inaugural year is to keep 40,000 tons of building materials out of the landfill, he added.

The automated process is a fairly simple one. Trucks dump the debris onto a concrete surface where the material is stored under a shed roof until a forklift transfers it to a bin at one end of a giant sorting mechanism. From the bin the material proceeds along a metal belt with shifting plates. That belt acts as a giant sifter, propelling larger items along while shaking out smaller bits of metal and other debris for separate sorting.

The metal belt moves upward to an elevated structure housing 12 sorting stations. An employee at each station pulls off one type of material from the belt and sends it down a chute to a large bin below. A control panel allows employees to adjust the belt’s speed or to pause it. There’s also an emergency cord that any employee can pull to stop the belt.

“We’re able to do what used to take us weeks in just a few hours and more safely,” Suleyman said. “We are leaps and bounds ahead of where we were just six months ago.”

Once the materials are sorted, buyers come to pick up the various commodities, which range from bricks to used paint buckets and carpet scraps. The only recyclable material found at both the C&D facility and the county’s household recycling facility is cardboard, Suleyman said.

New Hanover County’s environmental management department anticipates realizing $73,500 in revenue from the sale of recovered materials in the current fiscal year.

“What really tips the balance sheet in favor of this investment is in landfill airspace savings,” Suleyman said. “Our department operates as an enterprise fund, which essentially means we have to operate like a business – generate our own revenue and spend within our means. The vast majority of our revenue is derived from tipping fees at the landfill.”

Suleyman would love to see the county’s waste diversion strategies minimize the amount of land it needs in the 700-acre southern extension. There are better options for that land, he says, especially now that the county is extending water and sewer service along the U.S. 421 corridor that borders the site.

Other counties provide C&D recycling using more labor-intensive methods similar to New Hanover’s former system, but some are starting to automate, Suleyman said. There is a similar facility operating in Jones County, and Pitt County is following New Hanover’s example, using the county’s original Request for
Proposal as a model.  

The environmental management department has its eye on other waste diversion tactics, including expanding its hazardous waste and electronics collection program with once-a-week sites in Carolina Beach, Wrightsville Beach and Ogden. 

To cut down on food waste, the largest fraction of landfill content, the department is launching a pilot accelerated composting project, using pre-consumer food waste from University of North Carolina Wilmington dining halls. That experiment should be up and running by the spring of 2017, Suleyman estimates.

Future strategies could include mining the existing landfill and removing valuable commodities, such as metals for sale.

“The last alternative should be disposing of our waste in a lined landfill,” Coudriet said.