Carefully placed explosives in the Ogden grain elevator brought down 98 years of history and created 55,000 tonnes of mess.
That’s thousands of truckloads, or 3 months worth of all Calgary’s landfill-bound residential garbage.
It could have been a colossal addition to the yearly mountain of construction and demolition waste that reach city dumps each year — a mass city officials are striving to lower, because now it’s greater than what a Calgary-wide green cart composting program could possibly hope to collect and divert from landfills.
But Cargill, the elevator’s owner, plans to reuse or recycle 99.7 per cent of the rubble.
It’s not just a show of environmental stewardship by the agribusiness giant. Since the city jacked up its dumping fees for metal, concrete and other reusable construction materials — $135 per tonne now, compared to $50 four years ago — the landfill tab alone would have more than doubled Cargill’s total demolition and cleanup costs.
Grinding the concrete into gravel on-site only makes sense, mainly to fill the hole where the landmark elevator once stood. Carefully sorting the rebar and copper for resale, however, is more of a margin call, Cargill project manager Rahulan Sethupathy said.
“What we try to do is come out a wash,” he said of the 10-week cleanup that starts Monday.
“Hopefully, the value that we get for the scrap will cover the costs we endured to process the scrap. Often, it can be cheaper to take it to the landfill.”
Nothing in the city demolition permit or provincial rules compels Cargill to keep an ounce of the rubble from the dump. The same goes for new houses, which, according to the home-building industry, each render four to seven tonnes of leftover drywall, wood and other waste — much of it recyclable.
Tackling the sector’s dumping problem will be a key plank of Calgary’s plan to keep 80 per cent of city waste from landfills by 2020.
Source: Calgary Herald
By Jason Markusoff