In the spring of 2007, Engineers at Shaw Environmental had secured partial funding to enable the City of Aurora, Illinois to proceed with the remediation of an illegal dump site along the Fox River, North of the City's downtown renewal area. Partial funding was to come from the Illinois EPA available for tire remediation sites. The City's consulting engineers at Shaw Environmental developed a bid specification which required maximizing recycling; tire segregation for later removal by the Illinois EPA's tire remediation contractor, and the removal of more than 22,000 cubic yards of additional waste materials, piled more than 25 feet above the River Bank. Mixed debris and tires covered the two acre site, with waste wood, shingles and volumes of municipal solid waste requiring removal to Illinois landfills.
The bidding opportunity was examined by officials at Heartland Recycling, LLC, of Forest View Illinois. The Company is the operator of the West Cook County Waste Transfer Station, near Chicago's Midway Airport, and one of the major recyclers of construction/demolition debris and fibre in the Chicago Metropolitan Area market. The West Cook facility operates 24/7, except for Christmas and New Years Day, and manages up to 2,400 tons per day of municipal solid waste and construction/demolition debris from large and small contractors in the area as well as from municipalities, park districts, and highway departments.
Managers at Heartland Recycling recognized that maximizing recycling goals for the project would require maximum efforts in the segregation of materials. This was due to the fact that waste tires could not be marshaled for efficient removal by the tire contractor until entrained soil and debris was removed. Machinery wear in the tire grinding process demands the segregation of tramp metals, hardscape and soil, all of which damage the equipment of those recyclers, Joe Volini, Heartland's senior manager, pointed out.
Another screening requirement arose from the mixing of metals with all manner of other materials on the major portion of the site. Most of the work was located west of an auto junkyard and junk trailer storage facility. However, metals as small as brake shoes and as large as truck cranes were co-mingled with demolition debris and other materials that could only go to landfills for disposal. Non-shredded tires cannot be disposed of in Illinois landfills, and disposing of metals not only added to the cost of transportation and disposal on the job, but violated the spirit of the contract specifications and ignored a profitable area of work for the contractor, Volini pointed out.
The only winning solution was on-site screening of virtually the entire 22,000 cubic yard material pile. Heartland's equipment included an Erin model 165, Tracked finger screen with double finger decks and three product discharge points. Estimating the project for a screening application by the Erin machine, manufactured by Premiertech, a Canadian manufacturer, won Heartland the job by a 14% margin under other contractors, and virtually insured a profit through scrap metal segregation. The end result was an overall savings for the City of Aurora of over 25%, after all billing was processed, Volini said. I can't imagine how the job could have been managed with efficiency and maximum recycling, without the Erin/Premiertech, which is why we have recently purchased a stationary machine from Erin, as part of an integrated C&D recycling system designed jointly with the Company. We hope to have the new Erin system operational at our transfer station by July, Volini said.
We also believe the City and its engineers at Shaw Environmental were satisfied with the timeliness and efficiency of the remediation project, Volini said. We believe our three scrap yard customers were more than satisfied with the quality of the ferrous scrap, and the EPA's staff and tire contractors loaded and removed more than 200,000 tires from the river banks, he said.
Statistics on the cleanup, in brief, are as follows:
Project Duration: Six weeks in April and May, 2007
Total Cubic Yards of On-Site Debris: In excess of 22,000 (including junk trailers)
Total Tons of Material Removed to ground Surface: Over 14,000 tons
Total Tons of Tires: Over 2,000
Tons of Clean Concrete Recycled: 224
Tons of Metals Recycled: Over 380
May 27, 2007
Contact: Joe Volini at Heartland Recycling
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