In the late 1980s, a big push to recycle concrete materials was gaining steam.
Trey Brown and his father, Mason, decided to get on board the fast-moving train. The father-and-son team founded Big City Crushed Concrete in 1988 with a single location and recently opened its seventh location with a new facility in Fort Worth, Texas.
“It was a second career for my dad, who was highly successful in construction management before we got into recycling,” Trey says. “We had little knowledge and taught ourselves through hands-on experience and studying the industry thoroughly. In time, we learned what works for us and what doesn’t, and that has helped us grow and prosper.”
Big City Crushed Concrete’s locations are strategically placed throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, and all accept concrete from road and street tear-outs, demolition and other sources. The company also offers mobile crushing services.
“From a trucking standpoint, multiple locations provide a major advantage,” Trey says. “Contractors bringing materials to us have shorter hauls compared to when we had one or two yards, and this holds true on the other end for companies picking up the products we make. Reduced transportation costs help their bottom lines, and they are getting quality products that are as good as, or better than, virgin materials from a quarry.”
Each location has its own recycling plant that crushes the materials and separates rebar and other deleterious items. Big City Crushed Concrete is strictly a supplier and doesn’t have its own trucks to haul product.
“We make three basic items,” Trey says. “The main one is an aggregate base material used for subgrade under new roadways and streets. It can also be placed under building pads and used for backfill. Supplementary products are different gradations of coarse aggregate, and we only have those because they are incidental to maintaining the quality of our main product.”
Committed to quality
crushers. Photos courtesy of Kirby-Smith Machinery
Big City Crushed Concrete thoroughly tests its products to ensure they meet Texas Department of Transportation specifications for road base, as well as to comply with other customer standards.
“We probably spend more time and effort on testing than most industries or aggregate producers would,” Trey says. “We believe this demonstrates our strong commitment to supplying quality products that compete on a level playing field with traditional materials.”
Big City Crushed Concrete’s commitment to supplying quality products stretches back to when it opened its first location in Dallas. At the time, there was a need for dedicated recycling operations.
“We knew of one firm that was operating as a subsidiary to a large excavation company, and the crushing business was struggling,” Trey says. “We decided it was of the utmost importance to tackle concrete recycling as a primary business, not as a supplement. It focuses our attention on making quality materials, and it keeps us from competing with the contractors who bring us concrete or purchase aggregates from us.”
Longtime employees
Within the past three decades, Big City Crushed Concrete substantially increased the volume of materials it could produce. Today, it supplies some of the largest residential, commercial, municipal and state projects in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and surrounding areas.
“Early on we focused on small private and municipal jobs,” Trey says. “As the market expanded, so did the need to increase concrete disposal and recycling. We grew to accommodate the demand.”
The company’s employee list has expanded significantly, as well. The company now has almost 100 staff members. Many employees have been with the company 10 to 20 years or longer, and some are second-generation employees from the same family.
“We have cousins, brothers, brothers-in-law, nephews and sons who work for us,” Trey says. “Turnover has been quite low through the years, and we believe that’s a key part of Big City’s success. Because we retain employees, they grow with the company and become teachers for the next generation. Additionally, it’s a huge positive when customers call and talk to the same people, or truck drivers see the same loader operators on a daily basis.”
Reliable machinery
Big City Crushed Concrete’s operators are largely using Komatsu equipment purchased from Kirby-Smith Machinery with the help of Pat Farquharson, a territory manager at Kirby-Smith Machinery. The company began adding Komatsu to its fleet several years ago when the need for larger equipment became necessary in order to increase production volumes.
“Loaders are the lifeblood of our operations,” Trey says. “If they are down, we can’t feed the crushers to make products or load those products out. Komatsu’s reliability has been fantastic. We have virtually no downtime, and that’s significant considering this can be a very tough application.”
Komatsu’s WA600s keep Big City Crushed Concrete’s crushers full, and Komatsu’s WA500s with 7.2-cu.-yd. buckets allow the company to load trailers in two passes. In addition, Komatsu’s PC490LC and PC360LC excavators equipped with pulverizers help to reduce oversized pieces of concrete.
“The excavators have excellent hydraulic power to run attachments, so we’re able to break down large chunks of concrete into a size that the crushers can handle efficiently,” Trey says.
The company uses processors to separate rebar and other metals from concrete in order to cut those down to a size that can be transported for scrap recycling. Big City Crushed Concrete also participates in the Komatsu CARE program, which covers scheduled services for a machine’s first 2,000 hours or three years on Tier 4 machines.
“Kirby-Smith monitors the equipment and notifies us when the work needs to be done,” Trey says. “Then they come to our locations and take care of it with their skilled technicians.”
Available to help
In general, recycling concrete is environmentally friendly, as it reuses material that would otherwise end up in a landfill. Big City Crushed Concrete focuses on this and other ways it can reduce its environmental impact, Trey says.
“The nitty-gritty of what we’re doing is finding the most efficient, cleanest and harmonious way of processing concrete rubble in the metro areas while making the products our customers desire,” he says.
One way Big City Crushed Concrete tries to do this is by operating facilities in locations that are mostly out-of-sight and out-of-mind to the community.
“We try to select locations where the large volumes of trucks and machinery aren’t affecting neighborhoods negatively,” Trey says.
Having this focus has helped the company to grow in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and maintain its position as a primary concrete recycler in the community. The company keeps its yards open six days a week, and it accepts anything from a 5-gallon bucket of material from a homeowner to massive amounts of material from contractors tearing down buildings or removing roadways.
“We will even accommodate special hours by request and open at night for both dropping off and picking up crushed materials, if that’s what a customer needs,” Trey says. “We’re here to help our customers in any way we can.”
Information for this article courtesy of Komatsu.