Processing recycled materials presents an opportunity to expand a business by reaching more customers without having to invest in more people or overhead. Photo: iStock.com/tomazl
I used to travel to Alaska because it was part of my sales territory.
I would fly on small jets into remote towns such as Juneau, Ketchikan and Sitka. Most of these places were small in terms of population, and they could only be reached by airplane or boat.
Because the airlines had difficulty filling planes with passengers, they would use half of the fuselage to haul food and other supplies into these secluded places. I recall entering many of these airplanes from the rear, with the sound of chickens and other farm animals coming from behind the bulkhead on more than one occasion.
I was reminded of my Alaskan excursions years later upon hearing a consultant describe the ideal best value proposition. According to this gentleman, a company will find it easiest to make a business decision when growth is possible by increasing revenues and profits with an existing customer base through an existing organization – just like an airline sells empty space to haul chickens.
What is the point? For the portable contractor already equipped with mobile process machinery, processing recycled materials could present an opportunity to expand a business by reaching more customers without having to invest in more people or overhead.
With a little research, a contractor might find an opportunity to use existing equipment to process materials at a demolition site to reduce trucking costs; reclaim recycled pavements out of a landfill and process them into saleable products; crush a small mountain range of slag at the local foundry; or help a local asphalt producer improve their margins by supplying fractionated recycled asphalt pavement (RAP) to them.
Reimagining reserves
A statement that’s forever stamped into my memory is “it’s worth what it replaces.”
The late Don Brock shared this wisdom. At the time, Brock was referencing the economics of RAP as a supplement to asphalt mix. His point was simple: If someone can produce saleable asphalt at a lower cost by using recycled materials, there are greater profits to be made.
Years of research and thousands of miles of successful pavement in operation today proved this to be true.
In essence, Brock’s statement was – and still is – a challenge to producers in our industry to do their own research and determine if greater profits are available to them.
The formula is quite simple: Break down the total cost of asphalt into three categories: virgin aggregate, sand, and liquid asphalt. Determine how much RAP is allowed in local mix designs, and replace the cost of the virgin materials with the cost of producing RAP.
The same logic can be applied to an array of other recycled materials, including broken concrete, construction demolition, glass, slag or manufactured sand. Local landfills, construction sites and municipalities are often storing huge volumes of these materials, which they often consider waste. If we change our mindset and instead begin to look at these piles as reserves, then a whole new world open up for us.
Parallels
Consider that most of the same machinery can be used to process both aggregate materials and recycle materials.
For example, by adding a magnetic separator, both jaw crushers and horizontal shaft impactors (HSI) can be effective tools to crush broken concrete. HSIs are also ideal crushers for processing RAP or working as a secondary crusher to process almost any pavement. Compression crushers, including jaws and cones, are often suitable for crushing slag that can be used for aggregate.
Generally, the same types of screens are also used to separate recycled materials. Conventional incline and horizontal screens are used to screen concrete and asphalt aggregate, and high-frequency screens are perfect for fractionating RAP into smaller sizes to help meter the amount of recycled fines back into a new mix. They are also excellent for reclaiming valuable, saleable fines from a pile of reject sand.
Years back, I was taught to look for piles of waste and imagine them as valuable material just waiting to be processed. I believe there is a lot of waste out there, thus there is a lot of valuable material waiting to be processed and sold at high profits. All that was required was a market and the means to process the material.
I can think of no better tool than mobile, portable crushing and screening equipment that can be deployed to economically process smaller volumes of material.
Or, put another way, do you have room to haul some chickens?
Paul Smith is international marketing manager for Astec’s Aggregate and Mining Group.
