The Stoneway Concrete yard is situated only seven miles outside of Seattle, making the concrete rubble piled there ideally positioned for reuse in construction jobs around the city.
At the moment, the company has roughly 500,000 cu. yd. of concrete sitting on its 20-acre site. Stoneway regularly finds reuse opportunities for some of its material, pushing out about 150,000 cu. yd. as recycled concrete aggregate (RCA) every year.
Still, the area dedicated to piles continuously grows despite Stoneway’s push to sell it as RCA. Stoneway’s yard, like others around it, will eventually run out of room, leaving contractors with nowhere to turn with their premium demolition material except the landfill.
“Materials would take up landfill space for a much higher cost to the project,” says Greg McKinnon, operations manager at Stoneway Concrete. “That’s where we would ultimately end up.”
There was a time, not long ago, when recyclers in the state of Washington sold just about all of the concrete that they took in. In fact, before the last recession, some recyclers couldn’t keep RCA in stock.
Unfortunately, once the recession passed, the perception of RCA within Washington changed.
“After the recession, you’d think this was a brand-new product from Pluto that had never been seen before,” says Bruce Chattin, executive director of the Washington Aggregates & Concrete Association. “[The demand] just stopped.”
One barrier the state’s recyclers now face is the Washington Department of Ecology, which regulates where recycling facilities can be located but also the pH of recycled materials.
According to Jimmy Blais, director of development and the environment at Merlino Properties, the agency regulates RCA both at recycling facilities and on jobsites where materials are delivered.
“There are some storage issues that come into play,” says Blais, whose company is affiliated with Stoneway Concrete. “Contractors have to cover all recycled aggregate so water doesn’t have the potential to hit it. It could be an 80-degree sunny day, and when RCA piles aren’t covered you may get a citation.”
pH can, of course, be managed. But the involvement of regulators contributes to an unfair perception of the product, Blais says.
“You get into the local municipalities who have their own regulators, and that breeds a fear of recycled aggregate,” he adds. “All of a sudden the engineer on a project or a project manager doesn’t even want [RCA] on their site. They don’t want to have to deal with regulatory bodies, even if it is a more cost-effective product for them.”
A 2015-16 Washington state bill at least prioritized the use, reuse and recycling of construction aggregate and recycled concrete. HB 1695 required all Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) and large local jurisdiction transportation projects to use at least 25 percent construction aggregate and recycled concrete materials by 2016. Each year after 2016, that percentage must increase by at least 5 percent through 2020.
The bill is a positive step toward RCA’s acceptance, but WSDOT hurdles remain.
WSDOT prefers to utilize RCA that originates from WSDOT jobs. But, considering some recyclers have 500,000-cu.-yd. piles that keep on growing, Stoneway seeks better acceptance of RCA that originates from a variety of sources.
“We have a neighbor that also has 500,000 cu. yd.,” McKinnon says, “and neither of us knows specifically which aggregate source those materials came from. We’re confident 99 percent of that material came from a DOT-approved source. We have a fairly extensive quality control program at our facility, and [WSDOT] is adopting that as their model of acceptance for unknown materials. It’s a little bit new for them, but they will accept independent laboratory testing.”