Waiohai recycling extends landfill life nearly one year

PO’IPU – Are you watching, new owner of the Coco Palms?

In what Mayor Maryanne Kusaka and others hope will become a “great model for other businesses,” the old Waiohai’s demolition to make way for Marriott’s Waiohai Beach Club resulted in only two truckloads of debris making it to the Kekaha Sanitary Landfill.

If all 67,200 tons of construction debris had been hauled to the landfill, it would have diminished the landfill’s life expectancy by nearly a year, by county estimates.

Based on the county’s average intake of 6,390 tons of debris per month at the landfill, the recycling and reuse of Waiohai building materials effectively gave the county back 11 months of much-needed life at the landfill, said Allison Fraley, the county’s recycling coordinator.

“After what we’ve been able to do, I really believe we’ve definitely raised the bar, and we’re going to be the standard,” said Rob Centra, project manager for Marriott’s Waiohai Beach Club.

“I think it’s something that we will definitely ask (other) construction companies” to consider, said Troy Tanigawa, county solid waste programs administrative officer.

Nearly 60,000 tons of concrete debris created by the demolition has been recycled as structural fill beneath the under-construction new Marriott development along Po’ipu Beach here, according to Peter Q. Robson, president of Unlimited Construction Services, Inc. (USCI), the Kaua’i-based general contracting firm that performed the demolition contract.

Another 10,000 tons of steel, wooden doors and carpeting was recycled by being given to various local groups. The hotel, damaged and vacant since Hurricane ‘Iniki rumbled through in September of 1992, had to be torn down to make way for the new timeshare resort.

“Initial credit has to go to the Marriott,” Robson said of the six-month effort to bring down the old hotel and use 99 percent of it to either build the new one or donate to needy local organizations.

The Marriott’s request for proposals to bid on the demolition job required that bidders have a specific plan in place for recycling at least 70 percent of the debris, Robson said.

“We thought it was even more than achievable,” Robson said. “We felt we could take the concrete down and crush it up into suitable structural fill for the new buildings. That’s where our expertise came into play.”

Nearly 99 percent of the demolition debris was recycled or reused. “We only took two truckloads of stuff of the dump,” he said. By placing a rock-crushing machine on the job site, Robson said his firm was also able to avoid moving the equivalent of 3,000 truckloads of rubble through Po’ipu to an off-site rock crushing facility, then back through Po’ipu again back to the Waiohai site.

“The Po’ipu community would have been overwhelmed with that much trucking,” said Randy Finlay, vice-president of UCSI, noting that the impact on the traffic, roads and intersections would have been tremendous. “We’re citizens of this community,” said Finlay, a longtime Po’ipu resident.

While doing the right thing sometimes adds to the bottom line, the way this work was done actually saved UCSI nearly $4 million.

The cost of dumping 60,000 tons of concrete in the landfill at $56 per ton would have been close to $3.5 million. The new Marriott buildings were designed to sit above the flood zone, so structural fill costing almost $500,000 would have had to been purchased, had the concrete wreckage not been used for the same purpose.

The demolition job took about six months to complete, and could have been done in only three months if the recycling wasn’t accomplished, said Robson. The trade-off was worth it, he added.

“There was no downside at all,” Robson said. “It just seemed to make a lot of sense.”

When the Marriott first proposed to recycle 70 percent of the demolition debris, county officials seemed pleased. The actual figure of about 99 percent is “actually astounding,” said Centra, adding that he figures county officials are even happier.

“Now I’m sure they’re almost doing back flips,” he said.

“I think it’s just been a super project in that respect,” confirmed Kusaka. “I’m really surprised, to tell the truth. I thought, ‘Well, good for you, Marriott.'”

Kusaka hopes that this project will become a “great model for other businesses. It’s really been a win-win situation for everybody,” she said.

“I think it’s fantastic,” said Tanigawa. “For us, with our limited landfill capacity, that kind of diversion is definitely something the company can be proud about achieving.”

Fraley is particularly pleased with the reuse of materials, too, noting that resource conservation should be everyone’s goal.

“What’s so great about reuse is that often you have a commodity that doesn’t have value to one business but has a value to others,” she said. “Money is often a deterrent to re-users and recyclers. The perception is there that it’s more costly, but if they do the analysis, they’ll often find it’s more cost-effective.”

The key to success was extensive advance planning, said Finlay. Obstacles and logistical challenges were surmountable by figuring out choices and solutions long before reporting to the job site.

Finlay had a head start in planning the Waiohai demolition. “I live in Po’ipu, so I’ve been planning that demolition for eight years (since Hurricane ‘Iniki),” he said.

Robson said he hopes that any owner or developer considering razing an old building or building a new facility would look at the economic and environmental aspects of recycling.

“If you process it well and run it through the crushers properly, it’s easier to put down concrete than rock,” said Scott Snider, project engineer for RHS Lee, inc., the demolition contractors hired for the job.

“Concrete goes down real solid,” he said. “The end product is much higher quality than rock.”

Snider said that on O’ahu, where his company is based, it’s becoming mandatory to recycle construction debris because landfill space is so restrictive.

“You can’t take concrete to the landfill; it’s too cost-prohibitive,” he said, referring to the cost per ton to dump commercial waste at a landfill. “Hauling concrete will kill you.”

County representatives are working with state personnel to develop a statewide refuse network, sorted by island, to help contractors looking for ways to re-use and recycle debris, explained Fraley.

Once the network is up and running, businesses with recyclable materials will be able to electronically notify other businesses about what items they have available. Things that otherwise would have entered the waste stream will instead be diverted from the landfill.

“The problem is funding, of course,” Fraley said. “It always is with solid waste.”

Here is a look at some of the recycled Waiohai and its uses:

– 60,000 tons of concrete was crushed along with glass, toilet bowls and sinks, then used as structural fill where the new Marriott buildings will be constructed;

– Wood was stripped out – doors, cabinets, trim – and ground into mulch and given to landscapers;

– Gypsum (drywall) was stripped out and ground into soil amendment for use by local farms;

– Steel was bundled and sent to Hawai’i Metal Recycling on O’ahu to be melted down and made into new metal products;

– Carpeting was given to Habitat for Humanity for use as weed abatement mats on a tree-farming effort.

Grinding up the debris of a demolished four-story hotel is a quieter proposition than one might think.

“The rock crusher is not loud,” said Robson. “The backup buzzer on a forklift or excavator is louder than a crusher,” he said.

“Maybe it’s not so much that the rock crusher is quiet, as it is that those backup beepers are loud,” he said, laughing.

A larger excavator with a pulverizer, bucket, and scissors-type attachment was used to literally pull the building down, two to three stories at a time, Robson said. It took about three days to pull down each wing of the hotel.

The hotel was shaped like the letter E, Robson said, explaining that the center of the E was the first wing of the hotel to be torn down. The remaining parts of the building retained the noise and dust. Subsequent sections of the building were torn down in combination with prevailing trade winds, which blew the sound out to sea, he said.

Explosives were seriously considered, but discarded as a possible method to take down the buildings. It is the building’s weight that is relied upon to bring down a structure after explosives are detonated.

But for a four-story building, explosives were not only unnecessary, but the process would have created a huge amount of dust, Robson said.

“We set up a concrete crushing plant on the job site,” said Snider.

A concrete pulverizing machine, or “muncher,” as Snider called it, mounted on an excavator, broke the concrete into pieces two feet and smaller. From there, another excavator loaded those pieces into the rock crusher, which battered the rubble into pieces no larger than three inches.

Snider, who said his firm is the largest demolition contractor in Hawai’i and has the largest equipment, explained that not just anyone can operate a rock crusher.

“There’s a big health department permit to run the crusher. It takes a long time to get it (the permit), and you have to get re-permitted each time you move the crusher,” he said. The paperwork is so time-consuming that his firm now has a permit consultant handle it.

Pamela V. Brown is an insurance agent who is active in various community organizations, including the Visitor Aloha Society of Kaua’i. She can be reached at 639-4977.