Second to none

Premier Recycle Co., headquartered in San Jose, California, had a unique introduction to the construction and demolition (C&D) recycling industry. Beginning operations under the name Tote-a-Shed in the mid-1980s, the company got its start renting mobile storage containers to contractors in the Greater Bay Area.

During those early years of operation, Tote-a-Shed was approached by one of its largest construction clients to see if it could provide dumpsters—a request that ultimately would change the company’s trajectory.

“They asked [the owner] Rocky Hill if he had any dumpsters, and he said, ‘No, but we’ll make you one,’” says Premier Recycle Vice President Brock Hill, who also is Rocky’s son. “He then went back to our yard, took a cutting torch and took the top off of one of the storage containers, and that was one of our first dumpsters.”

In the years following, Brock says the company shifted operations to focus on hauling. However, upon taking a closer look at some of the material coming in, leadership recognized valuable commodities were contained in the loads being hauled to landfills.

“When they started looking at some of the material coming in, they said, ‘Hey, there’s good stuff in here. There’s metal; there are good items that we can take out,’” Brock says. “So, they started sorting in the back of the storage container yard. But eventually … California came in and said you can’t start [sorting material] without a permit, which is what really started the push to make it a completely separate company with permits.”

This ultimately led Rocky to purchase a 76,000-square-foot site in the early 2000s to facilitate full-service sorting operations, marking the beginning of Premier Recycle. Today, the company boasts a full suite of waste management solutions, including dumpster service, material recovery, waste plan consulting and regulatory compliance.

Forging a new path

This transformation of Premier Recycle’s service portfolio can be credited, in part, to Brock, who joined the company in 2008 at Rocky’s request.

“I was asked by my father to come and work with the family company, and my first gut reaction was ‘No way,’” Brock says. “The reason for that is that it’s a thin line to walk between keeping a family life and a good relationship with your family, and then mixing that with work. … It really has to be done correctly.”

In his first position at Premier, which didn’t have a designated title, Brock was responsible for modernizing the company. Describing it as a “fluid position,” Brock says his day-to-day tasks revolved around streamlining operations within the company, whether that be sorting at the recovery facility or updating computer systems.

“The first focus that I saw was the demand for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and green building projects,” Brock says. “We were already doing a lot of this work with construction companies, but from what I saw, there was a big deficiency in actual data from job sites. So, what were [the companies] actually recycling? What was the material coming off of the project?”

Brock says the city of San Jose had one of the most comprehensive C&D recycling programs in the country at the time—called the Construction & Demolition Diversion Program, or CDDP. “What that entails is a contractor, when they pulled out a building permit, would have to pay a deposit to the city based on square footage,” he explains. This deposit would ensure that if the contractor took the material to a San Jose-certified facility and could prove it with weight tickets, it could get a return based on how many tons of material were recycled.

“We were an early adopter into this system, and my focus was trying to make it easy for our customers,” Brock says.

A unique approach

Taking a different approach than most C&D sorting facilities, Brock says Premier Recycle focuses on helping contractors successfully divert recyclables on the job site rather than focusing on material coming into its recycling facility.

“About 95 percent of our material is on our own bins and trucks,” he says. “The contractors coming in are really a small portion of what we do. 

Our focus is ‘How do we make contractors successful on the job site and help them realize their goals?’ which, I think, is a very different take than a lot of other companies have.”

With this goal in mind, the company set out to design a data aggregation system to provide contractors with a breakdown of material diversion from the job site. This initiative is what jump-started Premier Recycle’s sustainable project management department, which falls under its waste plan consultancy division.

“We would take photos of every single 

load coming in and create our own … diversion reports to give a breakdown of what happened on their projects,” Brock says. “So, we could tell them in real-time if a bin was coming in from a project and if it was different material than it was in the past. [In that case,] we would give them a call and say, ‘Hey, what happened? This is different; is this a new project? What do we need to talk about to help you still achieve your goals?’”

By employing this method, Brock says Premier Recycle could be more proactive with customers. “We could actually achieve their [diversion] goals and not just at the end of the project ask for a bunch of weight tickets and hope for the best,” he adds.

Dedicated efforts

Since Premier Recycle was first started, Brock says it’s grown to become more proactive and comprehensive in its approach to recycling.

“In a sense, we’ve taken the place of the LEED consultants … Contractors and building owners now look to us to provide them with guidance because we’re the ones actually doing the work,” he says. “You can say you want 99 percent recycling on a project, but if you’re not actually out at the [site], you don’t know what’s going on.

“Our project management staff has the ability to go out to the job site and train the construction crews on what’s recyclable [and] what’s not recyclable, how to load a bin [to avoid contamination], etc. So, we’re training the contractors because their success leads to our success.”

For Caroline Niemiec, environmental project manager at Premier Recycle, the ability to pair the company’s sorting and material recovery capabilities with consulting services is how Premier sets contractors up for success.

“We see exactly what’s coming off the site, and we’re able to document that and track all of that data,” she says. “So, I feel like if anyone would be able to assist them with how they can better their diversion rates and the materials that they use on-site, it would be ourselves.”

When crafting a waste diversion plan, Niemiec says she often starts by pulling previous data Premier has regarding past projects a company has done, which helps predict its potential performance on the upcoming job. She adds that the consulting team also employs a variety of custom source-separating strategies, depending on the needs and limitations of the project.

“There’s a lot of factors to consider, such as the space they have,” Niemiec says. “Sometimes they can’t do as much on-site source separation as they would hope for because of the space they are limited to.”

Most recently, Premier was selected by one of the contractors the company works with to participate in one of the world’s first TRUE (Total Resource Use and Efficiency) projects, which is a new zero-waste certification program.

The project chosen for the first TRUE precertified construction site is Genesis Marina, which is a 570,000-square-foot commercial office and laboratory project that general contractor Webcor is overseeing in Brisbane, California. It is expected to divert roughly 90 percent of all waste generated.

TRUE precertification—which Green Business Certification Inc. (GBCI) administers—is an optional step available to developers regardless of diversion performance achieved. GBCI says precertification provides an “incremental pathway to formal certification that prioritizes the core actions essential to getting a successful start,” including auditing, analyzing and aspiring to zero waste.

“In discussions with [Webcor] we asked them … why they chose us. You know, there’s a lot of other companies out there and companies that are closer to [the project], but they chose us for our project management and the forward-thinking of trying to help them achieve something greater,” Brock says. “The contractor wanted to do it with us because of the transparency of our work.”

Maximizing diversion

Brock says Premier is one of the largest manual C&D sorting facilities in the nation. Using only two excavators and two wheel loaders for its recycling process, the company relies mostly on hand sorting to ensure material is clean and of high quality.

“I’ve been to a lot of facilities around the U.S., and I see they may be able to process more material than we can. But I also [look] at the costs associated with the machinery that they’ve purchased, the maintenance costs and their inability to quickly react to market changes, and I still have not seen where the tipping point is,” Brock says.

Averaging roughly 350 tons per day in processed material, Brock says Premier uses a sorting method where everything is first stockpiled in the center of the yard where it is then separated by item. The pile, which is shaped into a half-moon and is about a foot deep, is sorted by teams of two or three people.

“[The sorters] start at one end of that spread and are positively sorting materials, so we’re taking out anything that is recyclable,” Brock says. “If it’s wood, they’re making a small woodpile next to where they’re standing. If it’s metal, they’re doing the same thing. Every type of item that we’re sorting out, they’re making these smaller piles on the outside edges of the spreads.”

After the desired materials have been sorted from the spread, they are consolidated into bigger piles that are then put in their respective bunkers. This material is then collected by Premier Recycle’s sister company, Maverick Logistics, which will haul outbound material to partner processors.

By offering customers an efficient sorting process and high-value consulting services, Brock says Premier Recycle follows a strong belief in “doing it right.”

He adds, “There’s rabid greenwashing that goes around, not just in the C&D industry but [in] recycling in general. I never wanted our company to be either of those. Either we’re going to do it and do it right, or we shouldn’t be doing it at all.”

The author is assistant editor of Construction & Demolition Recycling. Email her at hrischar@gie.net.