By: Rick Zettler
Created in 1980 as an offshoot of Independence Excavating,
whose resume includes demolition, sewer services and major earthwork--including
site work at Jacobs Field, the
home of the Cleveland Indians--Independence Recycling has grown into a
major-league success story of its own. From humble beginnings as a local
recycle contractor with a single portable crushing and screening plant started
primarily to handle demolition materials generated by its sister company, today
the company employs 60, operates nine portable horizontal shaft impact crushing
plants producing in excess of 3 million tons of spec product per year and
services a broad customer base east of the Mississippi River.
Independence Recycling owns several yards, including its
main location in Cleveland, Ohio, and others in Orlando, Tampa, Lakeland and
Fort Myers, Fla., where contractors can dump their asphalt and concrete recycle
material free of charge. This creates a win-win situation by saving the
contractors from hefty tipping fees at the landfills, while allowing
Independence Recycling to generate a reusable, saleable product for its
customers.
Two of the company's nine portable plants remain
predominantly stationary because of the sheer volume of material coming into
the locations--one located at a quarry off of nearby Kelly's Island and a
second based at the Orlando facility--while the rest of the plants are on the
road, hustling to crush 10,000- to 50,000-ton jobs throughout the eastern U.S.
Each plant is capable of producing a variety of spec products to meet the
customer's demands. "We will go anywhere it's affordable to crush, and we
will even crush for some of our 'friendly' competitors from time to time,"
said Independence Recycling Operations Manager Ron Brocco.
The brains and heart
Drawing from more than 15 years of experience, Independence
Recycling runs an efficient portable custom crushing operation. Each crushing
operation includes a two-person working crew--one loader and plant operator--a
Caterpillar loader, a skid-steer loader for site clean-up and a 53-ft van
trailer. The trailer is the brains of the operation, housing the office, a
generator, a compressor for running tools and every spare part logical to carry
for the crushing plant.
With the trailer being the brains, the heart of the crushing
operation is the portable crushing and screening plant. Independence Recycling
owns varied sizes of portable plants, ranging in production from 150-800 tph,
so it can be flexible enough to handle just about any custom-crushing application
that the customers demand.
Most of Independence Recycling's plants are moved at least
7-10 times per year, with the more portable plants moving most often. When a
customer calls in a job, Brocco looks at the master schedule of where each
crusher is located and how close the current job is to completion. He also
takes into account if the crusher is capable of efficiently handling the feed
material and job specs and completing the job on time. After considering all
the factors, he moves in the best plant capable of handling the job.
Mover doesn't drop the ball
One such call came from customer Angelo Iafrate
Construction, the general contractor for three interstate highway projects near
Lafayette, La. The contract called for crushing approximately 30,000 tons of
concrete material generated from work on I-49 north of Lafayette, the I-10/I-49
interchange in Lafayette and bridge work on I-10 east of Lafayette. The
finished spec product needed was a DOT 1.5-in. minus product to be used as fill
material for the reconstruction of these highway projects.
After checking the crushing schedule and considering all the
factors, Brocco moved in the best plant suited to tackle the tough application,
the IROCK RDS-25. According to Brocco, the RDS-25 was close in proximity, less
time-consuming to move and less costly to mobilize than the other plants in his
fleet. "The bigger plants didn't justify the move," because of the
job size relative to the cost/time to move them.
The IROCK RDS-25 portable crushing and screening plant is a
two-trailer design. The first chassis includes the engines, variable speed
feeder/hopper, 4056 impactor and under crusher feed pan. The second houses the
double-deck incline screen, recycle magnet, screen feed conveyor and return
conveyor. The RDS-25's weight distribution enables the plant to be moved
without component disassembly, while its design allows the plant to be erected
on site without a crane or other lifting device.
This is due to the plant's patented Automag system. With the
system's dedicated power source, a single lever hydraulically raises the
incline screen and recycle magnet into operating position and lowers them for
transport. With the Automag, the screening trailer can be readied for operation
in under a half hour.
Brocco concedes that even with IROCK's features to improve
portability, the two-trailer design is still slightly less portable than a
single-trailer design.
The RDS-25 was moved to a sand and gravel pit located
adjacent to the I-49 project and was set up and ready to crush within a day.
Concrete was trucked from all three interstate projects via 24-ton, 18-wheeler
end dump trucks and stockpiled on location. According to the terms of the
contract, the concrete feed was to be prepped by the general contractor into
sections no larger than 24 in. "We tell the contractor 24 in., so the
majority of the feed will be this size, but we know that we'll get some
larger," claimed Brocco.
And larger is what Ben Kelley, Independence Recycling's
on-site superintendent, got. Kelley estimated, "Fifty percent of the feed
was larger than 24 in." But the crusher was up to the challenge. Kelley
said that the RDS-25 is capable of devouring up to 3-ft chunks of recycle
concrete, but he doesn't like to feed a steady diet of that size feed into the
impactor.
Even with a sizable portion of oversized feed material, the
crushing plant was able to keep on schedule and efficiently deliver a passing
1.5-in. Louisiana DOT base fill material spec. A key factor in staying on
schedule was that, according to Kelley, more than 80% of the feed was crushed
to spec on the first pass through the plant. This challenge was made even more
difficult due to the abrasive nature of the aggregate making up the recycle
concrete.
High-strength bar
Part of what Independence Recycling brings to the table for
its customers is a broad-based experience with concrete and asphalt feed
material from a variety of regions throughout the U.S. A critical part of the
job, explained Brocco, is, "You have to know what type of aggregate is in
the recycle feed material."
The aggregate found in most of the concrete from the
Lafayette applications was predominantly a highly abrasive flint-based river
rock. Since Independence Recycling was crushing reinforced concrete, they could
not use high-chrome blow bars because the rebar increased the likelihood of bar
breakage. So one alternative was using a medium-chrome blow bar to crush the
feed. However, a relatively short wear life and increased down time to flip and
change the bars drove up the costs. So Independence Recycling turned to IROCK
Crushers for a better solution.
IROCK's ceramic bars offer the wear life of high chrome blow
bars, but are less brittle and will not break when coming into contact with the
reinforcing material in recycled concrete.
Independence Recycling used IROCK's ceramic bars with the
Lafayette application and both Brocco and Kelley reported nearly a doubling of
wear life over medium-chrome bars. Although the ceramic bars cost more than
medium chrome, Independence Recycling saves on the down time associated with
flipping and changing the bars.
Crushing numbers
The first year Independence Recycling went into the crushing
business, the company crushed about 75,000 tons. Since then, they have steadily
grown in size and number of tons produced. It took them 10 years to top 1
million tons produced but only another six to top the 3 million ton mark. With
a diversified arsenal of portable impact crushing and screening plants that
include production capacities ranging from 150-800 tph, this is not happening
to Independence Recycling.
Even with the current weak economic conditions and the
continued slow recovery, Independence Recycling's flexibility and ability to
meet changing market demands is getting them the jobs they need to stay strong
and continue to grow.
