This holiday season, while trash cans across America overflow with packaging, wrapping paper and discarded gifts, the Pitkin County Landfill faces an even bigger issue: the by-products of luxury building.
Every kid knows there are two ways to put away your Legos.
The easy way: just knock them over like a wrecking ball and toss them into one bin.
Or the hard way, separating all the pieces and sorting by size and shape.
Outside of Legoland, in the real world, contractors are taking the equivalent of the easy way, and this construction waste is filling the Pitkin County Landfill to capacity.
The 50-year-old landfill is expected to max out in about 14 years, but environmental health workers with the city are determined to prolong its life. They have launched a multiple-phase study to find fixes.
There are some real challenges. If contractors divert or sort this waste on the job site, it takes up a lot of space and time, can create congestion and adds to the project’s cost. If they throw it all in one dumpster and haul it to the landfill, then it becomes very difficult and even dangerous to sort. Plus, it's even more time intensive.
Beyond this, local contractors say there isn’t much of a market for used materials.
“The biggest problem is that America is just too cheap to buy stuff brand new,” said George MacDonald, an Aspen contractor.
MacDonald is from New Zealand, where the cost to ship in new building materials makes re-using much more attractive.
There are some local contractors who have targeted the reuse market.
JP Strait runs Aspen Deconstruction. Its specialty is taking a home or business apart and salvaging everything that can be reused, rather than demolishing it in one fell swoop. Think the careful kid who sorts his Legos by color and shape.
“When we take down a 4,000 square foot home, yes, you can use those materials to build another 2,000 square foot home out of it,” Strait said. “We did one in 2010, and we just finished — we’re now in 2016 — selling those materials.”
Because storage space is so expensive, Strait takes all that material to Parachute, Colo. He said many of the buyers come from rural areas, like Delta County.
Strait and his crews recently gutted an old Victorian home that will be extensively remodeled. He said it would take a demolition crew about four days to tear down the building, but it took Aspen Deconstruction three weeks.
Strait said the City of Aspen’s permitting process is infamous for taking up to 5 or 6 months.
“When the permit gets in place, everybody wants to rush, rush, rush and get the job done,” Strait said.
One way to encourage more diversion of demolition trash is to let contractors get in earlier to salvage as much as possible before the rush begins.
“That time is just wasted time for the client,” he said.
This fix might save property owners some time, but it likely wouldn’t cut costs much. The cost per square foot to carefully deconstruct is about double the price of a messy demolition.
“The hard sell really is the environmental side of it,” Strait said. “It’s a way to rethink construction.”
Even staunch environmentalists can balk at the extra time and cost that come with this kind of deconstruction, but contractor George MacDonald said there is another approach, too. In the early 2000s, MacDonald owned a company called Colorado Resource Management.
“We were regularly doing 80 percent recycling of the building, and doing the bulk of it with a machine, and [we were] able to do it in two or three days,” he said. “But it required a million plus dollars worth of equipment.”
That equipment included a grabber called a rotating grapple that could sort through the demolished material almost like a giant human hand, as well as a crusher and a shredder.
MacDonald recently sat in an excavator overlooking a dumpster filled with the demolished bits of a house on Cemetery Lane: drywall, lumber, curtains, window glass and lots of air in between.
This construction waste doesn’t have to be buried as waste, even if it’s all piled together.
“It can be shredded, either on site or at the landfill, and used as alternative daily cover,” MacDonald said. “Instead of using dirt every day to cover the landfill, they could be using this.”
Right now, construction material gets thrown into the dump, smashed by a 94,000 pound compactor and then covered with about four inches of dirt every day.
While it isn’t totally clear which method is more effective, the city is resolved that brainstorming more creative solutions is a must.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of Aspen Public Radio’s ongoing series about the life of the landfill.
*This post has been edited to reflect the correct name of Aspen Deconstruction.
