Salt Lake City, Utah, January 25--Metro Waste: The company is able to salvage about 55 percent of what comes in from projects such as the Capitol renovation
The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Dick Chatterton and his business partner, Paul Richards, were dumping tons of leftover lumber at the county landfill every day when Chatterton saw a news story on television about a homeless man who froze to death.
The two owners of a construction and demolition haulage company decided they couldn't in good conscience continue to be so wasteful. They started picking through the stuff they picked up from construction sites, looking for firewood. They gave the wood to homeless shelters and surreptitiously set out bins of scrap lumber free for the taking in likely spots around Salt Lake City.
Then they took their charitable impulses a giant step forward, and spent $3.7 million to design and build a hangar-like construction and demolition waste recycling facility on the city's west-side
industrial zone.
Now, two years later, workers at Metro Waste receive 1,000 tons of so-called C&D waste per day, six days a week, from 18 haulage companies. Trucks dump loads at the bottom of a long ramp, where an excavator feeds it onto a conveyor belt that carries piles of debris past a line of men who pick through the leftovers, searching for salvageable cardboard, carpet padding, lumber, plastic sheeting and metal.
"We built it hoping it would work," Richards said. "It was a huge gamble."
The Richards and Chatterton families in 1999 created Metro Waste, which at first was just a haulage business. Before that, they owned a concrete company. In mid-January, they began operating a landfill in Skull Valley.
When they decided to try recycling construction waste, they had a hard time finding anyone to tell them how to go about it. The facilities they toured in Massachusetts, Texas, California, Oregon and Washington were all too specialized. For example, a California C&D recycler only pulled out "green" waste - that is, material that could be turned into mulch.
They ended up creating their own facility design, and now they are hosts for others searching out possibilities.
"We built this facility to what we wanted to do," Richards said.
Metro Waste is taking tons of C&D material from the Capitol renovation project. Its contract with Kennecott Land's Daybreak project, a development of more than 13,000 homes in South Jordan, will yield more than 100,000 tons of leftover lumber, concrete, plastic, metal and other materials during the next 10 years. That's more than eight tons of material from each of the homes under construction.
The company also provides to contractors the "cans," or large metal containers, they set on the street during home renovation or demolition.
They salvage about 55 percent of what comes in, Richards said. "You know, you have good days where you get 80 percent and bad days where you get 30 percent," he said.
The men doing the picking stand on a catwalk on both sides of the conveyor belt, tossing the useful stuff into concrete holes that feed bins 15 feet below. Here and there are buckets filling up with aluminum cans, which the workers redeem for cash.
On a recent day, several tons of trash contained mostly old clothes, shoes and blankets, and didn't yield much that was useful to the business, though the workers did grab a surprising quantity of potted tea roses.
"It's actually phenomenal what people throw away," said Rob Richards, one of Paul Richards' sons.
Last year, they pulled around 100,000 tons of recycled material, then turned around and sold it, mostly to local companies. Metal Management takes scrap metal. Rocky Mountain Recycling takes plastic, cardboard and carpet pads.
