Crafted by confidence

Photos courtesy of Southwest Waste Services

While Fort Myers, Florida-based Southwest Waste Services is a relatively new company, its leadership’s tenure in the construction and demolition (C&D) recycling industry has helped it quickly expand in the southwest Florida market.

The company’s CEO and Manager Charles Lomangino has more than 20 years of experience in the space, previously having worked at Southern Waste Systems of Pompano Beach, Florida, and its sister company, Sun Recycling.

After college, he founded All Star Recycling and All Star Toilets, which focused on roll-off container and portable restroom services. In 2008, Lomangino merged the roll-off division of All Star with Southern Waste Systems and Sun Recycling.

With 14 recycling facilities throughout southeast Florida, the companies grew to become two of the largest privately held recycling operations in the industry and were later sold to Houston-based WM in 2016.

Lomangino reentered the market almost three years ago with the creation of Southwest Waste, a full-service waste hauling, disposal and recycling company. Today, Southwest Waste has seven postcollection sites, three of which are focused on mixed C&D, and four hauling operations.

In the following Q&A with Construction & Demolition Recycling, Lomangino discusses Southwest Waste’s processing facilities, sorting equipment and regional end markets.

Construction & Demolition Recycling (C&DR): What is the scope of your operations? How many facilities do you operate, and what are their sizes and capacities?

Charles Lomangino (CL): We have seven different locations. Right now we’re processing C&D at three of them. At the end of 2024, we will have five C&D processing facilities, and then two bolt-on facilities that do concrete crushing. So, right now, that’s the plan.

Out of the three that we have in operation, they all vary in size. Generally, they’re all roughly 4 acres. One site is actually 15 acres—one of the processing facilities. So, they’re all kind of a little bit different.

Starting up north, we have our Sarasota facility, which sits on roughly 5 acres. Right now, that’s just a transfer station. It will eventually become a processing facility; that’s going to be the last system that we build out.

We have one in Port Charlotte that is currently under construction. That’s a 15-acre site that’ll wind up having a 50,000-square-foot building and will be a full-blown C&D processing facility.

When you move further south from there, we have one in the city of Fort Myers that’s on Rockfill Road. That’s the one that we’re going to be touring [for this year’s C&D World]. That site sits on roughly 4 acres [and includes] a 25,000-square-foot building. The systems [are] partially inside the building and partially outside the building.

When you move south of that, we have [the] Mainline [facility in Fort Myers], which is 6 acres. Currently, it’s built like Rockfill; it’s got a processing system. That one will be retrofitted—well, actually torn down and rebuilt—probably in mid-2024.

As you move south of that, we have another processing facility in Naples that just got completed; that sits on 5 acres. That [facility] is outside … much like Mainline.

And then we have two concrete crushing facilities: One on Elsa Street in Naples, and then we have one that’s on Canal Street in Fort Myers.

C&DR: What is some of the equipment that you’re employing at these facilities, and what is your reasoning for selecting the equipment you did?

CL: Every one of our systems is designed by [Quebec-based] Sherbrooke OEM. The mechanical engineer [who] designs them all is Ian Levasseur. So, that is the one thing that is consistent throughout all the processing facilities. They do everything but the screens, the destoner and some other bolt-on equipment here and there. But mainly we use them because we’ve used them for the last 23 years—they help us design the system.

For screens, destoners and Bivitec screeners, we either use [Crystal Lake, Illinois-based] GK [General Kinematics] or Action Equipment, [Newberg, Oregon]. We’ve used GK for a long time.

On the newest facility in Port Charlotte, we are going to try Action screens. … We’ve had great success with GK but … Action has also been a system that’s commonly used, and we’re going to give them a try on the most current system.

But, for us, being partnered up with Sherbrooke OEM, that’s where the brain trust is of the design. We’ve used them for 23 years, and [we’re] just absolutely, phenomenally happy with the results of the systems that they design and build out.

C&DR: How did you design your facilities to get the highest throughput of clean materials?

CL: [It] changes based on the footprint of the property. When you look at the Naples facility that we just built, it’s a 5-acre rectangle, and we could pretty much build out anything we want[ed]; it’s a straight-line facility. … Material doesn’t have to take any 90-degree turns, which helps tremendously with throughput. We’ve hit numbers up to 120 tons per hour and been very efficient.

With recycling, usually, the faster you run, the less you’re able to get off the system. But, in this case, it being a straight-line system, we’re seeing numbers up to 120 tons per hour.

Whereas Rockfill is confined, to a degree, [to] a building. The screens are not inline; they’re side by side. The system does have a 90-degree turn when it gets outside the building. We’re running more at 100 tons per hour, [while] still being efficient at picking. So, I mean, you could run these things at 120 tons per hour, but you lose your efficiency—your recycling efficiency. So, [the Naples facility] is running at 120 … and maintaining its efficiency; Rockfill, you got to be around the 100 [mark] to maintain its efficiency.

C&DR: Do your processing operations rely primarily on mechanical sorting, or is there manual sorting, as well?

CL: It’s a hybrid. The C&D industry has not yet been able to go completely automized like you see in single-stream systems; they have opticals and robots. You really can’t get the pick with the C&D waste stream because the materials are so heavy. So, … most systems … have an A line and a B line. The A line is primarily labor; the B line is primarily automized with trommels, destoners and Bivitecs. There is a small amount of labor on the B line, which is used more for quality control—we call it a QC line—just to make sure the products, the rock product that we’re making, are clean.

With the Naples facility, we added one more step—the Yahl Street facility has two destoners, and we added an eddy current, so [we can get] the nonferrous out automatically.

C&DR: What challenges and opportunities are present for end markets, and how have you adapted to meet demand?

CL: End markets are always trying because they’re always evolving.

We actually still own, on the East Coast, a concrete crushing facility and metal recycling facilities. So, we’re very experienced with doing what we call the downstream systems—baling your own cardboard, grinding your own wood, crushing your own concrete [and] shredding your own metal.

What we try to do is be a good partner to the community. If there’s already an existing wood outlet, if there’s already an existing metal outlet [or] concrete outlet, we try to use what’s in our local community. If it’s not there, then we will build out our downstream systems to accommodate. But it is very, very challenging because what’s in the market [is] in the market; you [have] to try to either develop those markets, or you [have] to create your own.

Charles Lomangino is CEO and manager of Southwest Waste Systems, Fort Myers, Florida. Learn more at www.southwestwastefl.com.