On the right track

In March, Gilberts, Illinois-based waste services provider Midwest Cos. opened a new construction and demolition (C&D) recycling facility in Hampshire, Illinois, to better serve its customers and reduce landfill costs.

With clientele ranging from homeowners to local contractors to major waste companies, Midwest Cos. founder and President Steve Berglund says he needed a site that was “friendly for everybody.”

Previously, Midwest Cos. operated its C&D recycling business unit—known as Midwest Materials Management (MMM), providing recycling and industrial waste disposal—at a site in East Dundee, Illinois. The former facility processed roughly 250 tons per day of nonhazardous C&D debris using mechanical and manual sorting.

The Hampshire facility includes 26,000 square feet dedicated to sorting waste and separating recyclables from nonrecyclables. Construction and railroad companies can deposit material and obtain industrial dumpsters or opt for MMM’s pickup and waste collection services. The new facility processes a mix of wood, aggregate, metals and cardboard, averaging about 175 tons per day.

“Midwest Material Management has provided construction waste management solutions for more than 30 years, and our new 10-acre facility in Hampshire allows us to better serve our construction and railroad company partners,” Berglund says in a news release announcing the newly built facility.

Built for convenience

Priorities during the facility’s planning were traffic flow and increased efficiency, Berglund says, adding that seeing customers happy has been the highlight of the new operation.

“We learned a lot about [the] logistics of the facility and traffic flow, and [the] kind of material we’re going to be getting in, so we tried to make a more customer-friendly, employee-friendly facility,” he explains.

The fully paved facility is completely indoors and features self-service in and out scales. “You just pull on the scale, hit a button to grab a ticket, and then that’s the same ticket the guys use to grade your load inside,” Berglund says.

He adds, “I had an EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] inspection [a few months] ago, and the inspector … had some trainees with her. She said to them, ‘You’ve never seen a C&D facility, but you’ll never see one this nice.’”

For processing, the operation employs a destoner, a vibratory screen to remove fines and heavies, magnets for ferrous metals and a positive pick line for wood, shingles and cardboard. The system, manufactured by Quebec-based Sherbrooke OEM, was purchased from a bankruptcy sale in El Paso, Texas.

The facility also features a fire-detection system from Birmingham, Alabama-based Viper Imaging.

Closing the loop

MMM’s Hampshire location is LEED- (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-)certified, and Midwest Cos. has a history of sustainable initiatives across its family of brands.

One of the company’s subbrands is TiEnergy, a company that recycles and repurposes retired railroad ties. The ties are ground into TieRoc, a proprietary aggregate substitute in high demand by landfill operations.

“We mix railroad ties and wood, we grind it to a proprietary size and then we sell that to landfills for their roads and turnaround areas,” Berglund says.

He also patented a technology called The Tie Plate Picker, a machine that removes the metal hardware from each tie for more efficient grinding.

TiEnergy partners with Class I, Class II and short line railroads, commercial and industrial companies and landfills across the U.S. and Canada to help them meet sustainability goals and reduce their carbon footprints.

According to TiEnergy, 20 million railroad ties are retired each year and each repurposed tie saves 3.06 pounds of carbon.

The new MMM center in Hampshire will accept railroad ties and other wood debris, like other Midwest Cos. facilities, and give it new life as TieRoc.

A sustainable record

Berglund, who started Midwest Cos. in 1988 as a firewood operation to help put himself through college, has a long track record of giving a second life to end-of-life materials, which earned him a 2023 Notable Leader in Sustainability award by Crain’s Chicago Business.

Since those early days, he says he “stuck with wood” while also expanding into other markets, such as C&D.

“We try to process materials so that we do drive the most money out of it,” Berglund says.

Wood is either used in the TieRoc product or ground for mulch, aggregate is crushed and sold to local contractors, cardboard is compacted and sold to recycling companies and metals, such as steel, aluminum, brass and copper, are extracted for resale.

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