Installations send less waste to landfills

[dreadpirateroberts]

Installations send less waste to landfills

April 18, 2006

WASHINGTON (Army News Service, April 18, 2006) – Installations throughout the Army are applying the principles of sustainability as they build, renovate and demolish facilities.

A policy put in place early this year requires that all new construction, demolition and renovation contracts include the diversion of at least 50 percent of the waste from the landfill.

“As the Army continues to transform and recapitalize its assets through facility removal and new construction, there will be many opportunities ahead to practice the techniques of sustainability through implementation of this new policy,” said Ed Engbert, a program manager at the U.S. Army Environmental Center.

More than 1.4 million tons of construction and demolition debris was generated by the Army in 2004 alone, Engbert said.

“Deconstruction is a new approach to dealing with construction and demolition wastes that formerly were literally just swept under the carpet,” said Bill Eng of the Facilities and Housing Directorate in the office of the assistant Army chief of staff for installation management.

“Long-standing practices where excess, old buildings were demolished and hauled off to inert dump sites at supposedly very low costs, were in actuality very wasteful of our resources. The materials themselves could have been recovered for reuse with little or no rework if handled properly (wood beams, metals, concrete masonry materials, etc.) or reprocessed on site or locally into usable building materials, thereby avoiding the energy required to mine, harvest and transport virgin stocks and raw materials to processing plants, mills or smelters,” Eng said.

Deconstruction also reduces the volume of materials that must be disposed of in a landfill or incinerator. “By maximizing the amount diverted, we save valuable landfill space on our installations or reduce the cost of hauling and disposing of waste at off-post landfills,” Engbert said.

The world of recycling is mature enough that more and more nontraditional companies exist in the “food chain” of facility removal and waste management services, said Engbert. Many have developed business models that specialize in the labor, transportation, storage or retail aspects of recovering used building materials for reuse or recycling.

These service providers operate with an awareness that consumer demand for low-cost and/or architectural salvage of used building materials is increasing, and so is the traditional cost of transporting and disposing of construction and demolition waste in a commercial landfill, he added.

“Deconstruction is the most innovative thing that has happened in the infrastructure business since the pyramids. Maybe that’s a bit over the top, but it comes close,” Eng said.

(Editor’s note: Information provided by the U.S. Army Environmental Center.)