Rolling Through

If you can make it in New York, New York, you can make it anywhere, according to the song lyrics. In the manufacturing realm, this might be particularly true, since manufacturing has for several decades been gravitating away from Northeastern United States cities like New York toward the Sun Belt, Mexico and Asia.

The Brooklyn district known as Green Point was long known by residents of other parts of the city as the neighborhood with the highly-visible oil storage tanks.

Sam Cooper started his family business in the nearby East Williamsburg neighborhood in 1946 for the purpose of making such tanks, although most of the company’s units were smaller models for residential and commercial use.

By the 1960s, seeking new markets, the company was also making roll-off containers and other fabricated steel boxes and bins for industrial and commercial purposes.

The container line earned a good reputation and grew to include 10 to 50-yard roll-off containers and a range of small 1-to-8-cubic yard containers for smaller property owners.

According to David Hillcoat, Cooper Tank & Welding Corp. General Manager, the company’s 50 employees now make about 90 containers per week from the Brooklyn fabrication shop, sending them to customers from Maine to Virginia.

Some of the containers are used by demolition and hauling contractors right in New York City, which means they might find their way to Cooper’s other New York-based operation, its Green Point transfer station and mixed C&D recycling facility also located in Brooklyn.

The Cooper Tank transfer station has become a critical part of the overall company’s operations, which are now overseen by CEO Adrienne Cooper, assisted by key employees such as Hillcoat and transfer station General Manager Ray Kvedaras.

Handling steady truck traffic and large amounts of mixed demolition debris 24 hours a day, six days per week on just a one-acre plot of land causes no shortage of challenges.

But with a location not far from the commercial and construction hub of Manhattan, the operators of the Cooper Tank transfer station have good reason to find a way to make things work.

Using a circular traffic pattern and high-volume sorting equipment, Cooper Tank is able to handle more than 1,400 tons per day of debris brought in by an average of 150 trucks per day, according to Kvedaras.

The company’s proprietary sorting line is centered around automated equipment supplied by General Kinematics and Sherbrooke OEM, with one piece also made by the Bezner company of Europe.

A fleet of mobile equipment that includes Komatsu wheel loaders and Caterpillar excavators with grapple attachments is able to efficiently process the incoming debris and load the outgoing material.

In the sorting area, the series of screens and automated sorters (combined with manual sorters toward the front of the line) is able to harvest in excess of 80 percent of the material for recycling purposes, including ferrous and nonferrous metals, plastics, aggregates, paper and cardboard, and clean wood.

The wood is sent to a Morbark grinder so a uniform product can be made for the landscaping and composting industries. (The facility is one of only a few in the New York area that is approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a disposal site for wood infested with Asian long horned beetles.)

Many of the other products go to local specialty recycling companies that may further clean and upgrade the material. Much of the material is also used as alternative daily cover (ADC) at regional landfills.

In New York, the incentive to recycle is provided by the lack of landfill space in the city itself, and increasingly in surrounding counties and states.

Cooper Tank has been a long-time member of the Construction Materials Recycling Association (CMRA), and communicates with the association regularly regarding recycling opportunities and barriers in the Northeast.

Hillcoat and Kvedaras have little doubt that the need and the opportunity to recycle C&D material in New York is very real. This is something that the New York City Department of Design and Construction is also keenly aware of, having recently adopted the U.S. Green Building Council LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) standards for new building construction and material recycling.

At the same time, challenges exist, many of them having to do with the ability to garner genuinely helpful governmental support for recycling.

Having established an admirable record of compliance with state and local ordinances and regulations, the company has been working to gain approval for an expansion onto adjacent property that would allow it to operate more efficiently and enable truck traffic to queue on site.

At the same time, as its plans are proceeding slowly through the complexity of city and state regulations, the company has watched as new C&D waste transfer stations open up several miles away in New Jersey. Many of these transfer stations are located along railroad tracks with the express purpose of taking advantage of a legal loophole regarding recycling.

As noted in "Real Issues," starting on page 20 of this issue, the federal government’s Surface Transportation Board (STB) has been granting permits to companies that allow them to locate C&D transfer stations along railroad track rights-of-way that then exempt them from state and local laws

"In the view of many in the waste and recycling industries, some companies have exploited this exemption by claiming to be railroads when they own at best a few hundred feet of a railroad spur. They then set up waste transfer facilities, mostly moving C&D, and claim to be under the STB exemption," CMRA executive director Wiliam Turley wrote in a 2006 article about this same issue.

The behavior is taking material away from operators such as Cooper Tank, which complies with state and local laws and carries the significant costs that such compliance entails.

In 2006, the CMRA’s Turley also wrote, "So many [of the rail facilities] are now located in New Jersey that they have driven the tipping fee prices down to 60 percent or less of what they were two years ago."

Despite the challenges, Hillcoat and Kvedaras are eager to turn their plans for the Cooper Tank transfer station expansion into a reality. C&DR