Executive Q&A: Michael Gross

Michael Gross got his start in the waste and recycling industry in the 1970s while he was just a junior in high school after his brother asked him to help run one of his small Northern California hauling companies. Forty years later, Gross now serves as director of sustainability at San Jose, California-based Zanker Recycling, where his efforts to help lead some of the most advanced construction and demolition (C&D) recycling programs in the country earned him a recent induction into the Construction & Demolition Recycling Association (CDRA) Hall of Fame.

talked with Gross about leveraging technology in recycling, the importance of a strong team and what it takes to run a successful C&D recycling operation.

Construction & Demolition Recycling (C&DR): Finding end markets and dealing with regulations are unique challenges for C&D recyclers. Being in California, what have you learned being one of the companies on the forefront of tackling some of these challenges?

Michael Gross (MG): Markets are everything—without them, everything just goes to landfill, and we have accomplished nothing in the recycling world. We’re lucky because here on the West Coast, we have access to international markets that the rest of the country doesn’t have for some of the recyclables. We also have access to an incredible market with farmers for our organics and gypsum. The major takeaway is that markets exist in some unusual places, and it not only takes a dedicated focus to develop these, but it also requires you to spend the time and capital on making a clean product. As demonstrated with China’s National Sword, cleanliness is the key to markets.

At Zanker, we’re all about planning for the future. We’re looking at making a tremendous amount of changes in our operations so we can continue to diversify our markets and make our products cleaner and more marketable.

C&DR: Can you talk about your pursuit of new technologies, sorting methods and constant innovation at Zanker?

C&DR: Can you talk about the deployment of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) for C&D recycling?

Because of our increasing tonnages and decreasing diversion rates at our facility, we decided to construct an entire new sorting operation that included robots instead of utilizing an existing operation. AI is bringing reliability to our industry by increasing not only our diversion rates but also the cleanliness of our commodities. AI is here to stay and quickly becoming the new norm.

C&DR: What does it take to run a successful C&D recycling facility today while planning for the future?