Over the last several years, with an efficient separation process and continual internal training and education, Countrywide Recycling has grown from dealing with 30 to 300 tons of C&D recycling material per day and has managed to grow their diversion rate from 65 to 86 percent.
Grown out of the Construction and Demolition Industry, Countrywide Recycling located in Hamilton, ON (Canada) has been in operation for five years this coming April 2016. Owner and General Manager, John Voortman was in the construction industry when the idea was presented to him to start a C&D recycling business. 鈥淲e investigated the idea and said let鈥檚 give this a shot. So, myself and my two partners鈥攚ife Marie, and Dave Burtt鈥攕pent two years researching and preparing, one year to build our existing facility and then we started operations. We have been invested in this company for eight years now.鈥�
Currently, with 50 employees, five walking floor tractor trailers, three bin trucks, and one dump truck, 90 percent of Countrywide Recycling鈥檚 product comes in from C&D, with a greater emphasis on demolition waste. The company services the Hamilton area, which includes Burlington, Stony Creek, Caledonia, etc. with their bin trucks. With their walking floor trailers, they service all of Ontario and have gone all the way up to Mattawa, on the other side of North Bay. Countrywide Recycling also has roughly 500 frequent customers who bring in material (plastic, cardboard, metal, aggregates, wood, etc.).
An Efficient Process
As material comes into Countrywide Recycling鈥檚 facility, it gets dumped onto the tipping floor where a couple of employees sort the largest material (tarps, large plastic, large metal, couches, mattresses). From there, the excavators pile up what is left, send it onto a conveyor feed line where it goes through a Taper slot sorter, which sorts out the smaller items into a trommel. The trommel separates the fines out and sends the rest of the product into an air knife that will separate out all of the heavies. Says Voortman, 鈥淲e have 3 lines. 12鈥� and larger ends up on line 1,12鈥� and smaller goes on line 2 and all of the aggregates are processed on line 3. Finally, the material goes into the picking room, where those products are refined into 9 different bunkers, located underneath the picking room.鈥�
Voortman explains that the residual waste is separated out as well as heavy metals, cardboard, thin metals, non-ferrous metals and wires, etc. At the end of the lines, wood goes into a grinder to be ground up for greenhouses or waste-to-energy facilities. Metals are sent to metal recyclers, the cardboard goes back to the cardboard industry, concrete and aggregate goes to a rock crusher nearby and red brick aggregate gets picked up and crushed for landscaping and sport fields. The fines (a lot of them coming out of the trommel) go towards beneficial use at landfills for use as daily cover.聽 Voortman also points out that they hire out five to six other trucks to come in and do some deliveries and pickups of demolition material to the facility. Countrywide Recycling is currently bringing in approximately 300 metric tonnes of C&D waste per day.
Recently, the Canadian Standards Association completed a guideline to better accounting and auditing for the performance of recycling facilities like Countrywide Recycling. The 鈥淕uideline for Accountable Management of End-of-Life Materials鈥� establishes a set of common definitions, performance metrics and reporting requirements in support of best practices in the management of end-of-life (EOL) materials. 鈥淲e are hoping that this is going to help the industry by providing a level playing field and ensuring the purchasers of services understand what they getting,鈥� says Voortman. 鈥淭here is an awful lot of C&D waste that is presently going into landfill that can be recycled and a lot of companies out there that say they are recycling materials but aren鈥檛. We all know that recycling results in enormous reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and offers a significant economic opportunity.鈥�
Challenges and Achievements
There are a couple of challenges that Voortman says Countrywide Recycling is currently dealing with. One is the cost of disposal鈥攖he current cost is simply so low that it undermines recycling efforts. 鈥淭ipping rates in Michigan and New York are under $10 a tonne which dictates what happens in the market.鈥�
Another challenge is LEED reporting. He explains that this program has always been a challenge because there are so many transfer stations that do LEED reporting with no oversight and low recycling rates as compared to Countrywide Recycling. 鈥淭here is no process to verify anything. It鈥檚 one of the poorest run programs in the country. We are competing with these transfer stations who simply extract only the most valuable materials and send the balance to landfill. That is one of our major challenges.鈥� The hope is that the CSA recycling guideline will become the new standard for purchasers of recycling services, for programs like LEED and for government oversight. The guideline allows the real recyclers to be sorted out from disposal companies.
Despite this, Countrywide Recycling has managed to go from about a 65 percent to 86 percent internal diversion rate. 鈥淲e鈥檝e done that through learning and making sure our employees understand the diversion process better. There are some machinery additions that we鈥檝e made for better efficiency鈥攁lthough we have great equipment, there are always ways to improve them. We also try to constantly have a better understanding of the industry鈥攚hat we can divert and figuring out the ways to make it happen,鈥� says Voortman.
He points out that although they do all of our learning inside the facility, there are also some lessons they take from their customers. 鈥淪ometimes, we ask different companies if we can do things differently and from there we figure out whether we can do it or if it makes sense doing it; we also develop our own ideas on how to be efficient and how to do things better based on what the industry needs and that has been the biggest achievement. We didn鈥檛 come from this industry, so it鈥檚 been a learning curve for us but we are getting it down pretty good.鈥�
Safety, Training and Outreach
Countrywide Recycling is always making sure that their employees are up on the latest safety and training techniques. Training goes hand in hand with safety. 鈥淪afety is very important to us鈥攅veryone comes here with 10 fingers in the morning and we want them to go home with 10 fingers,鈥� says Voortman. Training includes Tool time talks, bringing in outside people to do training on the different machinery and sending their supervisors to five-day courses for safety training (through a program that is run by the government). Tool time talks and individual training are done once per month and the trainers come in as needed.
Even though Countrwide Recycling is unique in the work that it does, they do keep themselves in front of the communities they service by marketing the company through the Ontario Waste Management Association by sponsoring some of their events, such as golf outings and the annual general meeting of the organization, etc. 鈥淲e mostly advertise to our peer group in a particular area and our sales person, Holly Washuta does an excellent job,鈥� says Voortman.
Plans for the Future
According to Voortman, he and his two partners believe that the company could run two shifts. 鈥淲e鈥檇 love to do that and the way to do it would be for us to get a transfer station in the Toronto area. Then we can further service, not just construction debris but demolition debris from our customers who can鈥檛 fit a tractor trailer everywhere in downtown Toronto. We could have some bin trucks there and better service our customers in those areas. Nothing is available as of yet. We are looking at doing that in the future. At the moment, we are also expanding our bin rental business in the Hamilton area.鈥�
Nevertheless, Voortman is proud of what the company has accomplished so far. 鈥淔ive years ago when we started, we were bringing in 30 tons per day and now we are doing 10 times that, so we have been continually growing. We are a lot busier this year than last year and still going strong.鈥�
For more information, contact Marie Voortman at (905) 679-7499, ext 103 or visit .
