As the Pitkin County Landfill heads toward capacity, the City of Aspen is turning its focus to the largest garbage producer in the valley: construction and demolition projects. But reducing the volume of this trash is no simple matter.
On a late fall morning, solid waste director Cathy Hall and I watched truck after truck pull up to the Pitkin County Landfill and dump masses of lumber, drywall, insulation, plastic sheeting, cardboard, some pipes and broken windows, curtains, couches, mattresses and rolls of carpet.
“Everybody’s trying to get their projects done before the winter snow hits and they have to stop, so everybody’s on a rush now to get demolition and construction projects done,” Hall said.
That may be part of it, but a study last year showed that people in Pitkin County produce nearly twice the national average of garbage per day. And 80 percent of that trash is from construction and demolition projects.
So city staff and a team of consultants are starting to look into how to keep this material out of the landfill, which the experts say will close in 14 years. Trash consultant Laurie Batchelder Adams said Pitkin County’s garbage ratio, which compares construction and demolition waste to all the other trash, is “pretty wild.”
“Which tells me that we need to find some pretty innovative and creative solutions,” Adams said.
Adams and the city’s environmental health department hosted a couple of meetings this fall and have created some online surveys to gather input from the construction industry.
The challenges in dealing with this type of trash boil down to time and space. To reuse or divert construction or demolition waste, you have to sort it, and that means a lot more time on the job and multiple dumpsters, often on tight construction sites.
Liz Chapman heads up the city’s waste reduction efforts; she said contractors don’t have much incentive right now to try to divert trash.
“They are getting rid of it in the way that they are legally obligated to do,” Chapman said. “And it’s not costing them a ton of money, so diverting construction and demolition waste does not hold a huge financial incentive for that community at this point.”
Of course, cost is relative. The landfill charges $64 per ton to dump construction waste; household trash is about $10 a ton cheaper. Landfill director Cathy Hall explained that’s because it’s harder to compact building materials.
“And it’s also kind of, hey you’re paying more for this, you probably want to think about what you’re throwing away,” Hall said. “And so when you see the loads come in with scrap metal and things that are recyclable, it’s like, you just paid for that when you didn’t have to.”
In a climate where time is money, most of that cost is likely passed on from the builder to the client.
The landfill takes scrap metal for free (and sells it for a profit) and offers big discounts on other recyclable stuff, like asphalt.
Those discounts aren’t enough to make up for the extra time it can take to separate, and even the city’s own projects are not necessarily models of efficiency and recycling.
“We are holding ourselves to the same standard we are holding other people,” Chapman said. “The question is, is the standard high enough?”
It’s a pretty low bar. The city used to have an efficient building checklist — where construction projects have to earn a certain amount of points, tied to green building initiatives like conserving energy and reducing waste. The city abandoned it a few years ago.
“Given the current staff levels we have, it was not practical to enforce it,” Chapman said. “And the other thing that we found is people weren’t doing it, because of the time and space.”
So for now, a bunch of potentially re-usable construction waste is piling up in the landfill. Chapman explained that materials like drywall and treated lumber, especially, are challenging.
Drywall is both recyclable and compostable, but the landfill isn’t doing either right now. It’s more expensive to recycle drywall than to buy it new, and the compost area doesn’t have enough space.
As for lumber, building inspectors worry about structural integrity of re-used wood. You can’t compost it once it’s been treated to make it fire resistant or painted to look nice, and there isn’t much of a local market for reused lumber.
“There are a lot of ways you can use used lumber for, like, chicken coops and outbuildings and buildings that don’t necessarily need to meet the same structural specifications that a house or commercial building would need,” Chapman said.
But there are only so many chicken coops being built in Aspen.
EDITOR’S NOTE: As part of our ongoing series about the life of the Pitkin County Landfill, tune in next week to hear how local builders are tackling the construction waste problem.
