CMRA honors recyclers.

At its recent Annual Meeting in Miami, the Construction Materials Recycling Association (CMRA) handed out its 2006 awards for excellence in construction and demolition recycling.

Byron Lord of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) was named C&D Recycler of the Year. Within FHWA, Lord has been a catalyst for the agency's acceptance and promotion of the use of recycled materials in the highway environment.

The CMRA's Concrete/Asphalt Recycler of the Year is Dan Copp Crushing, which has been recycling those materials since 1970 in one of the most active recycled aggregates market in North America, Southern California. Dan Copp Crushing ranked at Number 5 on Construction & Demolition Recycling magazine's 2005 list of the 20 largest concrete and asphalt recyclers in the United States. (C&DR is a Recycling Today Media Group publication.) The Anaheim, Calif.-based company operates 12 recycling yards, four associate yards and six portable crushing plants, producing about 2 million tons of recycled aggregate and nearly 3 million tons of products in all.

Dan Copp Crushing strives to be a good neighbor in heavily urbanized Southern California by beautifying the curbside view of its facilities and using water trucks and sprinklers to dissipate dust at its crushing plants, and rumble grates and asphalt paving are in place to help prevent dirt and dust from leaving the premises.

The winner of the CMRA's Mixed C&D Recycler of the Year award is also based in Southern California and was an honorable mention in last year's competition. Since then, Downtown Diversion has maintained its city-certified 76 percent recycling rate, the highest among the 10 recycling facilities certified by the city of Los Angeles.

The facility takes in mixed C&D and separates the material into clean concrete and asphalt to send to another recycling facility. Scrap metal, wire and cable are marketed to local scrap dealers, while wood and green materials are ground on site for the mulch and biomass markets. ADC makes up only about 10 percent of its total production. In addition, Downtown Diversion processes clean drywall for agricultural use.

By keeping all of its operations under roof, Downtown Diversion also wins good neighbor points. It has to, because the facility is located centrally in Los Angeles, while most other disposal options are much farther away and usually have longer waiting times to dump. The tipping area is also under a roof, which reduces airborne debris and noise, and the entire site has a misting system that mitigates dust, which decreases air pollution and improves air quality for employees.

The Horry County Solid Waste Authority (SWA) won the award for Best Government Recycling Program. Besides owning the local landfill, Horry County SWA also operates much of the equipment to recycle the C&D material that arrives at the site.

The authority is a quasi-governmental agency based in Conway, S.C., near Myrtle Beach. It has separate areas for MSW and C&D debris.

After starting off years ago with tire recycling, the agency began a composting facility where the wood is separated into three categories--yard debris, land clearing debris and clean C&D. A horizontal grinder processes 30,000 tons of wood per year and the authority has the other equipment needed to make a finished compost product. It also has a chipper to make mulch out of another 6,000 tons of land clearing debris.

The Horry County Solid Waste Authority also accepts metals, OCC, asphalt shingles and concrete. The latter two are ground up and crushed, respectively, to provide temporary roads at the landfill face. For the last 10 years the facility has not had to buy outside materials for that job.

The 2006 CMRA Awards were handed out at the association's Annual Meeting in Miami in mid-January. For more information about the awards, contact the CMRA at [phone] or at [e-mail].