Source Separating Feels Right

Your article “What’s New in Construction Waste Management” moved me to write—and to finally subscribe. I’ve been sharing a subscription with someone else, but now I feel I can’t wait for the

EBN to come my way. So be it if I’m being environmentally incorrect by ordering my own copy. Or is it? What is

EBN’s position on that?

I always enjoy the frank, brass-tacks discussion you provide in each issue, and the article cited above was no different. I did want to share a few observations from my recent experiences assisting contractors here in the Twin Cities.

So as not to conceal my opinion in the least way, let me start by saying that I am an unabashed advocate of source separation. I suspect you all are too, however you did much better at concealing it than I.

A few additional pros for source separation:

•It moves people from bottom-up thinking to top-down thinking when it comes to changing the proverbial end-of-pipe mentality.

•What we are separating are resources—not wastes. A little story to illustrate this point. A few years ago an acquaintance of mine was attempting to give a talk in the Philippines on waste reduction. In the middle of his talk a group of women stood and started chanting, “There is no waste, there is no waste…” They were representatives of a community advocacy group in the Philippines that refused to recognize that waste exists. Their point is that what we call wastes are actually resources.

•By source separating materials you can start to educate people well beyond the construction workers. Clients, architects, suppliers, etc., can all see what resources are being purchased, designed and sent to the site that end up as waste. (Note: In one commercial project I am working on, we are requesting that subcontractors provide estimates of the types and quantities of materials they estimate wasting over the course of the project. We are using this approach to phase our source-separation efforts appropriately on an 80/20 rule basis. However, more importantly, in the future the general contractor is planning to use these waste estimates to identify specific contractors who are “price-padding” because they are needlessly wasteful with materials. It may also become a decision factor in hiring subs.

Finally…a word about commingled waste-separation operations. We have just such a resource here in the Twin Cities. I had the chance to tour it a few years ago and found a few specific “cons” of this approach.

•Significant public subsidies went into this particular operation. Now we have a very hungry kid to feed; as you pointed out in your article, these operations are competing for the best “wastes.”

•Worker health and safety exposures. I inquired about the turnover rate of their employees only to find they had none as they hired all temporary workers. The enclosed operating environment of this particular type of operation is not a particularly healthy one.

Two more tips for contractors:

•Take part of a day and hitch a ride with your waste hauler. Learn where the materials go and how they are actually processed.

•Apply what you learn from your source-separation efforts toward source-reduction investments. Translate the “waste” data into “materials cost” data. Think of a dumpster of source-separated wood waste as specific board footage of purchased materials. What can you—and others—do differently next time?

How about an article on source reduction in construction along the lines of what you did on waste management? What are folks doing to design waste out of the construction process?

Keep up the great work! And hurry, hurry send me the next copy of

EBN!

Joel Schurke

WRITAR

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Editors’ response:Thanks for the useful suggestions and personal experiences with waste reduction. And yes, we do believe it is environmentally acceptable to subscribe yourself rather than sharing an

EBN subscription. In our quest for sustainability, we need to sustain our own efforts as well—but do share your own subscription with others until they realize that they too need to subscribe. And before long we hope to make it possible to subscribe electronically—which should also save paper.