Undeterred Recycling

“If we can’t get [sufficient revenue] coming in per ton, we have to get it by being that much better at pulling it out and selling it rather than not pulling it out and dumping it.” – Vic Liotta Jr. Photo by Liane Liotta

Being a recycler of construction and demolition materials hasn't been easy the last few years. Faced with a shrinking material stream and having to keep up on government regulations that are constantly shaping the way material is processed, collected, or sold can certainly have an impact on business.

Liotta Bros. Recycling, located in the Long Island, N.Y. area, has experienced its share of the above, but continues to take in material, produce wood and aggregate products, and strives to achieve its goal of zero waste.

Its owners, brothers Vic Liotta Jr., and Patrick Liotta, started the business in 2001 after working with their father, Vic Liotta Sr., in the trucking business. Vic Jr. recalls as a truck driver, picking up debris from land clearing operations for disposal. He would then drive products made at the disposal site back to the landscaper or contractor. His brother and he realized they could set up shop for themselves by processing wood debris, crushing concrete and screening topsoil at their own facility.

Liotta Bros. accepts trees and brush from land clearing and makes mulch, compost or wood chips. Vic Jr. says Liotta Bros. supplies all the landscape supply yards in Long Island, Westchester County and some in Connecticut and New Jersey with its products. Westchester County is a large consumer of its products, says Vic Jr., because of the all the landscaping activity that takes place at the many large office buildings there.

In addition to the landscaping products, wood at the facility also is made into wood pellets for home heating, horse bedding, mulch and is turned into a bulking agent for biosolids. Land clearing companies provide the wood for these products, which are produced at the company's four-acre site. The crushed concrete is turned into drainage stone.

C&D material comes into a different area of the site for weighing and processing. Liotta Bros. uses a processing system built by Sparta Innovations of Notre Dame, New Brunswick, Canada. The system combines screeners, air knives, bag houses, float tanks, vacuums, magnets, trommels, gravity belts, crushers, dye coloring tanks and grinders to separate material into various fractions (See sidebar, "The Sorting Process," at right).

"This system was designed to give us the capability to process any type of construction and demolition debris, heavy or light," says Vic Jr.

Liotta Bros. will keep a record of each job's recycled materials percentage to help a project receive the necessary documentation for the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

"After the job is completed, the customer gets a spreadsheet, showing what material was pulled from the waste stream and how it was recycled and reintroduced into the manufacturing stream, therefore minimizing the need for virgin materials and diminishing the amount of materials that were simply thrown away," explains Vic Jr.

What Liotta Bros. doesn't make into new products at its facility it finds homes for. The company separates out plastic, ferrous and nonferrous metals, cardboard, paper and vinyl siding. It sells the sorted material to various end users.
 

Mounting Problems
For a company like Liotta Bros., which gets its supply of material from land clearing and demolition debris generated from new construction sites, the drop in new home and commercial building construction has hit the business hard. With a drop in landscaping product demand, Liotta Bros. also has taken a hit on its product sales side.

According to Vic Jr., the big office and institutional campuses in Westchester County aren't buying landscaping products like they used to. "Instead of mulching at the beginning of the year and the end of the year, they are just buying at the beginning of the year," he says. "Their budgets for buildings and grounds are down, which creates problems for us."

As if the situation weren't difficult enough, Liotta Bros. found itself facing difficulty on a legal level in the spring of 2011 when it was charged after an investigation by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) for selling mulch that contained "traces of arsenic." Vic Jr. says the incident "basically put me out of business for a while." It also left him unsure of how to proceed with mulch production.

Vic Jr. says he was told by the DEC the acceptable level of arsenic in mulch is zero, but according to him, that number is unachievable due to the fact that arsenic is a naturally occurring substance.

"That is an unrealistic number to work with," states Vic Jr. "We have to compete with companies that are either working with no permits or bringing in unregulated mulch from out of state."

What Vic Jr. says he hopes to do is at least start some dialogue with the DEC so that C&D recyclers can be educated on what percentage of contaminants are acceptable in their mulch products. He says he would like quicker, more direct answers from the DEC, but the department tells him to wait.

"Waiting is not an option for us. We are open every day," says Vic Jr. He says he now has the company's mulch tested for its contaminant levels and keeps the results handy should the company's product ever be brought under scrutiny again.
 

Taking Control
Liotta Bros. Recycling may not have control over what the economy or government agencies do, but it can control what it does with the material it receives. That is why, even though the company is getting less material than it was a few years ago, it has tried to make the most out of its material stream.

Liotta Bros. has slowed its process down and separated its material stream further to get more of a premium for its end products and reduce even further the amount of material that is being discarded at the end of the process. Vic Jr. recalls a recent job demolishing The Courtesy Hotel in Hempstead, N.Y., for Mill Creek Residential Trust. Liotta Bros. was able to achieve a 96 percent recycling rate and help Mill Creek earn LEED points for the 150 luxury apartment homes the company is building.

"If we can't get [sufficient revenue] coming in per ton, we have to get it by being that much better at pulling it out and selling it rather than not pulling it out and dumping it," explains Vic Jr. "If we can continue to bring our recyclable percentage up by finding new ways to separate it and new customers to buy it, then that [amount] coming in really shouldn't be that critical."

He continues, "It is the number coming out that we need to bring up, and that is what we are trying to achieve—to separate the product and keep it clean enough to be able to sell it for a higher price to make up the difference, since we don't get as high of an intake as we used to get."

Vic Jr. recognizes that further processing could also mean an added expense in equipment upgrades. Rather than investing in new equipment, Liotta Bros. has been maximizing the capabilities of its current system.

"We have been making a few changes with our system that we have," says Vic. Jr. "We are not looking to put anything new into the system, we are just looking to add to what we have by screening and processing a little more than we have in the past to bring [our material] to a point where it is cleaner." 
 

The author is associate editor of Construction & Demolition Recycling and can be reached at ksmith@gie.net.