Your Cheatin' Heart

A lot of people are now on the C&D recycling bandwagon for many reasons, including the rise of the green building movement. These programs, such as LEED, currently require the recycling of material generated from construction and demolition sites in order to gain points for high standing. Under LEED, the credits for recycling are among the most claimed. The reasons for that are numerous, as the waste is highly visible so that drives people to want to recycle it, recycling of C&D is usually cost effective, and it is relatively easy.

Or is the reason that the credit is so often claimed is that it is easy to fudge the numbers and claim a high recycling rate even when there is virtually no recycling going on?
That is what several legitimate mixed C&D recyclers say as they are reporting that so-called recycling facilities are putting in their customers’ hands reports for LEED that claim outrageous recycling rates that are impossible with the equipment and systems they have in place. For example, there is a landfill that has three pickers working at the face. They will sometimes pick a few items from the incoming loads and set them aside, but reportedly not much, and the sorted piles can sit there a month before they are moved. This facility has been claiming an 86% recycling rate for its LEED customers. A nearby legitimate C&D recycler has a 78% recycling rate, and has been telling his competitor’s customers that the 86% is impossible, because “we spent millions of dollars on a processing system and a building to do this right. If we could have done 86% with just three pickers at a landfill, don’t you think we would have done it?”
But there is often a blind or even an ignorant eye turned toward the recycling rate by the customer, as they are doing whatever it takes to get the LEED points and gain a higher certification level. The customer does not know how to evaluate C&D recycling facilities and the quality of the job they are doing. They can’t tell if the recycling rate is a sham.
In response, the CMRA is going to develop a C&D recycling facility certification program that will verify the recycling rates of a plant. This action has been encouraged by the U.S. Green Building Council, which recognizes the need for some type of program to maintain the integrity of LEED in this sector. We will be working with former CMRA Board Member Stephen Bantillo to develop this program. When Bantillo, a winner of the CMRA C&D Recycler of the Year, was with the city of San Jose he established the first ever certification program of recycling rates for C&D facilities.
Some want to see how much is recycled off of an individual project, rather than a facility recycling rate. To follow one set of boxes from one project throughout a facility is cost prohibitive and very difficult. The alternative is to “eyeball” a load when it comes in to estimate how much of that load can be recycled. This requires guesswork by the estimator, and if a system would be ripe for fraud, it would be one relying on someone who is trying to please a customer to estimate how much can be recycled.
The timeline to develop the certification system is late 2010. It remains to be seen how the recycling credits for LEED will evolve, as there is tremendous pressure to tone down their relevance (subject of another column). But at least this system can allow the green building movement to compare apples to apples.

William Turley
C&D World Associate Publisher & Editor
CMRA Executive Director
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