This ain't no disco, it ain't no country club either, this is C&D waste in LA

Sheryl Crow was right, this is LA and when it comes to C&D waste, this is dealt with in Los Angeles sized portions.

My guides today are Shufan Wei and Tim Hoang from the City of Los Angeles. They explain that successive tightening in regulation by both the state and city governments have dramatically increased the level of C&D waste captured by material recovery facilities.

Regulations require both waste collectors and waste processing plants to be licensed with the City. This allows a situation where collectors are obliged to take C&D waste to licensed facilities such as California Waste Services (CWS) located in Gardena CA.

The CWS site is one of 11 licensed C&D waste MRFs in Los Angeles. Whilst they vary in scale and in sophistication, CWS is doubtlessly a leading facility. The first thing that strikes you is that despite being consented to receive 900 tonnes of waste per day, the site is spotlessly tidy and clean. All work is gradually being brought indoors and there is absolutely no sign of litter blowing around getting caught in gutters or in fences. 

For context, this plant could process half of Auckland’s C&D waste each year.

CWS accept both co-mingled C&D waste and inert (cleanfill) material. Inert material goes through some mechanical and manual separation of large pieces of concrete and brick with those materials being crushed and soil separated. Interestingly, crushed concrete and soil are given away for free for use as basecourse.

    


Co-mingled C&D waste goes through multiple layers of separation and processing. A combination of manual separation, magnets, sieves, and ballistic separators pull out wood, metals, concrete, plastic and plasterboard of various sizes to get to a level of 70% diversion.

The key learning from this visit is the relationship between regulation and investment in processing capability. CWS are consistently improving their processing capability, but this is underpinned by the certainty that regulation will bring a flow of materials to process.

  

Whilst MRFs are not an encourager of waste minimisation at source, improving their sophistication is a nonetheless a necessary way of tackling C&D waste when the scale of waste is no disco or country club.

My thanks to Shufan and Tim from the City of Los Angeles and Enrique and Armando from California Waste Services for sparing me the time to show me around CWS. 

 

Links: 
California Waste Services:
https://www.californiawasteservices.com/

City of Los Angeles sustainability https://www.lamayor.org/sustainability#:~:text=SMART%2C%20SUSTAINABLE%20BUILDINGS.,the%20top%20of%20the%20list.