Nashville Demolition Company Morphing into a Green Advantage Contractor

The evolution, according to Cline, is to make the company a “green advantage” demolition contractor. “We saw the future of Nashville to be more green building, and the only way for us to be a major player in that game was to be able to recycle more. Demolition contractors are all in the same game. If you don’t own the landfill, you don’t want to take the material to the landfill and pay the tipping fee.”

That was the discovery he made when examining Demo Plus’ expenses one year, how much was being spent for outside haulers to bring boxes in to haul away debris to one of the two C&D landfills in the Nashville area. So the first step was to set up a C&D hauling company, DP Trucking, which currently has six trucks and hundreds of roll-offs. But to provide better recycling service, the company had to go further.

The next step was to buy land near Nashville to set up a recycling center for both concrete/asphalt and mixed C&D recycling. A properly zoned plot was purchased near a small Nashville airport with the intention of turning it into an industrial park once the recycled aggregate was added to stabilize and improve the site.

Cline said there was little mixed C&D recycling going on in Nashville, despite the city’s requirement that all projects more than 5,000 sq ft in size and $2 million in scope must attain some level of LEED status. As recycling is the most claimed credit under the green building program, there was a need for better recycling in the area. In fact, reportedly the local Waste Management landfill facility was bringing in a high level recycling plant from one of its other locations in order to start processing.

Cline saw a need to have an independent do mixed C&D recycling. The name on the trucking company was changed to Earth First C&D Recycling, and the process to permit and build a processing facility began in earnest.

Earth First C&D Recycling was hauling mixed debris down to a small dump-and-pick operation 70 miles away. It also set up an agreement with a landfill in Clarksville, Tenn., also 70 miles away, to set up a C&D recycling plant there. But the move to put one in near Nashville has stalled because Davidson County, where Nashville is situated, wants to require the C&D sorting to be done under roof, the only county in the state to do so, Cline said. It is not a state requirement, so the plan for now is to downsize material in Nashville and take it to Clarksville for sorting and processing for end markets.

Of course this is not the only barrier to mixed C&D recycling in that region. Tipping fees are incredibly low. “The Southeast is not the same market as the east or west coasts,” Cline said. “It is actually cheaper to landfill it than recycle it. The tipping fees are low, but are going up.” He said locally it is a yardage-based market, and it is only $7/yard to tip outside of Nashville, around $10/yard to dump C&D in the city itself.

However, Cline insists there is a need for a mixed C&D recycling facility in the area that will provide certifiable recycling for green building projects, which he says is not happening now.

The challenges of getting a mixed C&D recycling facility going have not been evident in other parts of Demo Plus’s business. For example, the company was using a subcontractor to do its abatement work.  But Cline worked with employees to set up a new operation, Bennett Environmental, an abatement company.

Environmental surveying was another task that had been outsourced. It was determined that there was an opportunity to set up another company to handle just that,
and Environmental Consulting Re-sources was created.

The demolition business had continued to grow with a focus on commercial and industrial. “You have to want us to do residential for us to do residential,” Cline said, indicating a lack of interest in the work. Currently, Demo Plus relies on seven (two Cat 330s, one Terex 330lc2 High Reach, two John Deere 200lc2, one Kobelco 55) excavators to do its work, including a 60-ft Terex unit built by Company Wrench. Cline said it is the only high reach owned by a demolition contractor in the entire state of Tennessee. He said he was renting the unit because of several contracts on taller buildings, and got so far into it that it just made more sense to convert it to ownership, especially because the company had just won another contract that would require the unit’s services and adding another in the first quarter this year.

Usually on the high reach is a UP 25 Stanley LaBounty attachment with both shear and processor jaws. Other attachments include a grapple, breaker and bucket.

Demo Plus is expected to stay about the same size it is now for the foreseeable future. The area of growth will be in growing mixed C&D recycling facilities, Cline believes. “The Southeast does not have a lot of recycling going on right now,” he said. “It is something we expect to grow, and after we get this facility up, we have some other markets we are looking at.”

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