Trial & error

When he was working to get the company that would become Rockwood Sustainable Solutions off the ground, Lincoln Young would go to construction job sites and deliver containers, asking construction workers to fill them with wood for recycling. When he returned, he’d find the bins filled with various materials—and the wood burning in a pile beside the container.

“I’d go, ‘Guys, what’s happening? All I said I wanted was wood, and you’re putting in all these other things,’” Young recounts. “And I’d have one guy look at me and go, ‘Lincoln, if you can’t figure out how to sort our debris, we’re not going to be able to do anything with you.’”

That was all the feedback Young needed to begin developing a method to sort construction materials, and it signaled the start of a new mixed construction and demolition (C&D) recycling chapter for Rockwood, a Lebanon, Tennessee-based company that got its start in shingle recycling. Now, it’s a full-service C&D recycler that handles wood, concrete, plastics, cardboard, tires, metal and drywall.

“Up until last year, we were the only company in middle Tennessee that was recycling construction materials,” says Young, president of Rockwood Sustainable Solutions. “That’s a good and a bad thing. The good thing is there’s not a lot of competition. The bad thing is that everything that has been started in the state, we’ve started it.

“It’s been a great success story, but we’ve kind of had to start the process through research and development, through permitting, through permission from the environmental office to how do we implement this business and get it started and make it viable and scalable.”

Young grew up in and around the construction business, with a mother who worked building custom homes in Tennessee. Whenever he had days off school, Young would tag along to help clean up jobsites. Early in his career, he got into the roofing business and envisioned a company that would handle shingles from residential roofing projects, launching Ground Up Recycling in 2014.

“That’s really where we started through that process of how do we handle these materials? The landfills don’t want them,” Young says. “Once we started that and figured that out, it really just kind of went from there.”

From the start, he’s leveraged the knowledge of fellow C&D recyclers through membership in theConstruction & Demolition Recycling Association (CDRA), a Chicago-based trade association.

“I’ve really tried to surround myself with guys with experience,” Young says. “You get around guys that have been in this thing for 20 years, and they’ve all dealt with what I’ve dealt with. … It’s been a phenomenal network of men and women that just kind of work together and help each other out.”

He consulted with CDRA members to learn more about recycling shingles into asphalt. Initially, Rockwood partnered with LoJac, a Lebanon, Tennessee-based grading and paving company with 12 asphalt plants.

“We set up three collection sites in middle Tennessee, and we were collecting shingles, processing those, and it was going into the asphalt,” Young says.

As the business continued to grow, Young saw an increasing need for wood recycling, and in 2016, he launched a second business, Rockwood Recycling. The city of Lebanon had plans to put in a gasification facility that would use sludge from wastewater treatment, wood and tires as feedstock. Starting in 2017, the city partnered with Rockwood to handle collecting and processing the wood and tires.

Rockwood collected a lot more wood than the gasifier needed, so the company expanded into the mulch business, providing material for animal bedding and similar products.

In 2017, Rockwood sold Ground Up, its shingle recycling business, to Vulcan Materials Co., a Birmingham, Alabama-based producer of construction aggregates.

In 2019, Young had the opportunity to buy the business from his partners and became sole owner, changing the name to Rockwood Sustainable Solutions.

In 2024, the company is on a trajectory to handle about 80,000 to 90,000 tons of materials, having increased its volume by 1,000 tons per month, Young says.

Services and facilities

Rockwood offers hauling services as well as Leadership in Energy and Environment- (LEED-) compliant sorting, recycling and documentation for construction companies and contractors. It also offers waste material management for industrial and manufacturing companies, roll-off container services and other rentals.

Young says most of what arrives is material from new construction projects, though the company also processes wood from pallets and crating used in the automotive industry.

Rockwood operates out of two facilities, including its main, 35-acre site in Lebanon. The site is home to a sorting facility, depackaging machinery, a mulch yard, a wood yard and drywall and concrete recycling operations. A smaller satellite facility in Huntsville, Alabama, handles sorting materials for a few key contractors in that area looking to achieve zero-waste-to-landfill goals.

Much of the inspiration for the ground sorting system Rockwood uses at the Lebanon facility came from fellow CDRA member Alan Burns, who runs a family-owned C&D recycling company, Burns & Co., in Philadelphia. Young has gotten to know Burns over the years at C&D World and other association events.

“He has developed a lot of the technology that just works. It’s not the fanciest things, but they work,” he says. “We’ve kind of deployed a lot of that same stuff here.”

That includes specially made wheeled carts situated throughout the ground sort area. Sorters throw materials into the carts, which can be moved around with a Teletruk forklift from JCB, Pooler, Georgia, to allow for more turns and more capacity.

Rockwood also uses Tommy Carts, a product Burns created. They can be loaded into a box truck, and 21 carts equal one 30-yard container.

“We take those to high rises and congested areas in Nashville where you can’t put a dumpster on the street,” Young says.

Rockwood uses a high-speed grinder from Vermeer, Pella, Iowa, to grind wood and a 6000 low-speed shredder from Denmark-based M&J Recycling to shred material after it’s been sorted.

Gypsum was the most recent addition to the company’s list of accepted materials, added in 2023 after Metro Nashville reached out and asked Young to figure out a drywall recycling option for the area.

Young’s team consulted with different vendors for about three years to develop a system to bring in and process drywall. Recycled drywall had not previously been approved for agricultural uses in Tennessee, so Young worked with the University of Tennessee’s agriculture extension office, legislators and the Tennessee Department of Environment Conservation to approve the necessary permit changes. Rockwood partners with Lebanon-based Arrowhead Ag to use recycled drywall in soil amendments for the agriculture industry.

“We’ve actually had more demand for the product than we have supply, which is the only product that I’ve ever dealt with that,” Young says. “Most of the time, we’ve got way more supply than we do demand, but with drywall, that’s not the case, so it’s been a really good one for us.”

Accepting drywall not only keeps the material out of local landfills, it also allows Rockwood to help its customers go from 65 percent recycling rates to close to 90 percent.

“It’s a really good win for all of us because we’re able to work together as a team on it, which is kind of the essence of recycling and part of the thing that I like most—creating a network in the community [where] we can all work together,” he says.

Just as he’s done with drywall, Young says he works hard to develop strong downstream partnerships to move all of Rockwood’s end products.

For instance, for its recycled wood, the company partners with a mulch company called Benchmark that runs blower trucks that can install 10 yards of mulch in one hour.

“Instead of going out and trying to sell every nursery in the community mulch, we supply these blower trucks, and so we’re their No. 1 retailer,” Young says. “It keeps us from having to market and brand every single step along the way.”

Never say no

Young’s business philosophy centers on refusing to say the word “no.”

“Sometimes that is very challenging [for] our team,” he admits. “How we have adapted has just been moving with the market. I’ll tell you it’s a lot easier to steer a moving ship.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, which caused a near-complete shutdown of the construction industry, Rockwood didn’t have a lot of materials coming in. Meanwhile, Young started getting calls from industrial customers saying they still had shipping containers coming from China, and warehouses were filling up with few products being moved out.

“I said, ‘OK, bring it on.’ And they said, ‘Well, it’s all packaged up. We just need it destroyed,’” Young says. “So, we put in lines, and we had guys sitting there cutting boxes open, pulling metal parts out of plastic bags. And it allowed us to pretty much get through that COVID period by just being adaptive to the market.”

When it comes to Rockwood’s services, Young has chosen to keep a diversified business model.

“We don’t have any section of our business that’s more than 10 to 20 percent of our annual revenue,” he says. “So, if we lost an entire section of business, we could flip into another section very, very quickly. Staying mobile and lean has allowed us to be very competitive.”

Future growth

Looking to the future, as the company continues to grow quickly and move from infancy to adolescence, Young says, “We’ll start focusing down on end markets and on moving these specialized materials in the state.”

He’s looking to move beyond a ground-sort system and deploy a sort line at the Lebanon facility to handle increasing volumes of material. Additionally, as the market continues to morph, he envisions building two or three more collection sites and sorting facilities across the South.

Young says he’d like to continue to grow his end markets and has an idea to set up end-use hubs at each new Rockwood facility. Each hub would be focused on one specific material, such as wood or concrete, a logistics move that would allow for more efficient hauling across the region, he says.

“One of the things that we’re continuing to look at is instead of growing in the collection of unsorted materials, we may start working with some of the larger companies to take what they’re sorting and have an end home for that, whether that’s wood or drywall or concrete, and expand those end markets,” Young says.

Success in the C&D recycling space is about understanding the market and its needs, he says.

For Rockwood, that started by providing shingle recycling and morphed into wood recycling. From there, Young says he remains dedicated to making life as easy as possible for Rockwood’s customers.

“We’re using similar technologies [as competitors],” Young says, “but to be successful you’ve got to find the need and fulfill it.”

The author is managing editor of Construction & Demolition Recycling and can be reached via email at smann@gie.net.