Panoramic View

The view from above the Cuyahoga River valley of the Kurtz Bros. Inc. mulch production facility in Valley View, Ohio, offers a recycling tableau in several colors.

At the center of the picture on an early April morning are three five-story mountains of mulch—one black, one red and one a natural light-brown wood color.

Winding in and around the three mulch piles and through the rest of the 22-acre parcel is a road hosting several busy, bright yellow wheel loaders as well as several trucks, some of them clean white trucks with the Kurtz Bros. "Good Earth" logo displayed on the side of the trailers.

The scale of the operation is impressive, and yet it’s just one of several multi-acre properties in the southern suburbs of Cleveland that host Kurtz Bros. recycling and production facilities.

These plants work in coordination to help supply the company’s four retail/wholesale landscape supply outlets. The end markets for the products have also prompted the company to capture a growing percentage of northern Ohio’s wood scrap, yard and land-clearing trimmings and mixed C&D debris.

Much of what the company has created in Cleveland it has started to replicate in Columbus, Ohio, as that city in central Ohio becomes its second key market area.

It is not a coincidence that the tracts of land owned by Kurtz Bros. are located throughout the Cuyahoga River valley south of Cleveland.

Preparing products from the river valley’s rich alluvial soil for area farmers was among the initial activities that the Kurtz family was involved in during its more than 60 years in business, along with delivering coal and operating a general store.

For several decades Melvin H. Kurtz, who passed away in 2008, operated the business now known as Kurtz Bros. Inc. that increasingly focused on offering landscape supplies, including soils, compost blends and mulch.

During the past three decades, a growing percentage of the products offered by Kurtz Bros. have derived from recycled materials.

Several factors steered the company in this direction, including its operation of an inert landfill and its location near several other landfills that can provide feedstock. Perhaps more importantly has been a decision by the company’s leaders that its location in the middle of a large population center has made tapping into the "urban forest" a sensible strategy.

A series of recent major investments underscores that brothers John and Tom Kurtz (Melvin’s sons), who now guide the company, approach recycling as much more than just a marketing angle.

Major investments include both a composting and a waste-to-energy operation at a sewage treatment plant in Akron, Ohio, and a mixed C&D recycling system that began operating in 2008.

The Kurtz Bros. 2009 Product Catalog includes a range of products with recycled-content origins, including:

On the same April day when trucks were lining up to ship mulch out to Northeast Ohio garden centers and landscapers, just a mile or so away on another piece of Kurtz Bros. property, a crushing subcontractor was revving up an Eagle Crusher Co. plant and producing three sizes of crushed red brick products.

The crushing crew from Cleveland’s B&B Wrecking (See "Standout Performance" in the Jan-Feb. 2007 edition of C&DR for a profile of B&B) was creating three crushed red brick materials that are marketed for different uses and applications. They all have their origins, however, in the red bricks that are gathered at the Kurtz Bros. mixed C&D sorting plant.

Located on yet another parcel of land in the southern suburbs of Cleveland, the mixed C&D plant includes conveyors, screens and picking stations made by General Kinematics and Sherbrooke OEM.

The outdoor plant is surrounded by considerable storage space, which allowed Kurtz Bros. to build up an inventory of mixed C&D material as it prepared to ramp up its system for its first full year of work in 2008.

The company is still working through some of that material, and the inventory on hand may be a blessing if construction activity is as slow as predicted in 2009.

Even in a tepid economy, however, material continues to come in across the truck scale at the entrance to the mixed C&D facility.

Some of the inbound material is there specifically to earn LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) points for property owners and contractors involved in a project that is striving for LEED certification with the U.S. Green Building Council.

According to Kurtz Bros. Account Manager Dave DeVito, incoming loads seeking a recycling percentage for LEED purposes are tipped separately and also run through the plant separately.

The mixed C&D plant features a General Kinematics vibrating fingerscreener at the front of the system. The fingerscreener sends 8-inch-and-over material to a canopied area with sorting stations where up to 8 sorters can pick recyclable metals, concrete, brick and block, wood and lumber, cardboard, plastic tarps and carpeting.

Material that has fallen through the fingerscreener (8-inch-minus) passes beneath a belt magnet and heads next to a starscreener that is usually set at a 2-inch-minus setting.

Overs head to another set of sorting stations where sorters, as of early April, they are focused on keeping an eye out for usable wood that can be diverted to the company’s mulching operations as it ramps up for the busy spring landscaping season. Sorters can also focus on red brick at this stage.

Unders head to a Sherbrooke combination shaker-blower machine with two fans that help direct recyclable paper and plastic that is eventually taken to a Royal Oak Recycling facility in Cleveland that specializes in recycling those two materials.

The mixed C&D system has proven popular with haulers who are finding that their inert landfill options are decreasing, even in Ohio, a state not known as one with a landfill shortage. "Two nearby landfills have closed," says DeVito.

The surge in popularity of the LEED system has been another factor in favor of the facility.

Diane Kurtzman, marketing coordinator at Kurtz Bros., receives credit around the company for having predicted the emergence of the LEED system and for urging the company to take advantage of opportunities connected to LEED. "We saw this coming and it has really snowballed here in Ohio in the past year-and-a-half," says Kurtzman.

As part of its mixed C&D recycling service, DeVito and Kurtzman helped design a LEED tracking sheet that the plant’s operators can use as they run a load of materials from a LEED project through the plant.

The sheet tracks inbound cubic yards of material and then measures cubic yards of recyclable material produced (as well as residual or non-recyclable cubic yardage).

The company promotes its ability to serve the LEED market, with one brochure noting, "Kurtz Bros. Construction Support Services recycles construction debris easier and more completely than anyone else around. Kurtz Bros. Inc. is pleased to be part of efforts that contribute to the conservation of our natural resources and environment."

Beyond inviting haulers to use the facility, the company also spots roll-off containers in five different sizes ranging from 10 cubic yards to 60 cubic yards.

The company also invites haulers, contractors and other decision-makers to visit what they market as "the MRF powerhouse of construction/demolition recyclers," and conducts bi-monthly tours as well as arranging private tours.

While LEED certification helps bring material into the plant, the company’s knowledge of landscaping products and its considerable processing capacity help ensure materials will be recycled efficiently.

The mountains of mulch being created in April were being produced in the midst of what DeVito called a "wood shortage" caused by the construction slowdown and considerable demand from the energy market for clean wood.

DeVito estimates that Kurtz Bros. has enough material on the ground to keep its mixed C&D system busy for a year. That system in turn can help harvest enough wood to keep the company’s Continental Biomass Industries (CBI) Magnum Force grinder and its AmeriMulch coloring system busy churning out landscape mulch for buyers in northern Ohio and beyond.

The EarthPro brand mulch, the recycled aggregates, blended topsoils and other recycled-content products have become priorities for Kurtz Bros. that properly allow it to proclaim that the company is "Making the good earth better."

The author is editor in chief of C&DR and can be contacted at btaylor@gie.net.