September/October 2013
The benefits of paving a scrapyard are well known, but think through the paving material, formulation, installation, and—if it’s an existing yard—retrofit challenges to ensure the process goes smoothly.
By Theodore Fischer
“To pave, or not to pave? That is the question every scrap facility should [consider] for existing and new facilities,” soliloquizes Larry Berndt, principal of Wenck Associates, an engineering and environmental consulting firm based in Maple Plain, Minn. This scrap take on Hamlet’s query has long vexed scrapyard operators, in part because there’s no one-size-fits-all-scrapyards answer.
People have been singing the praises of paved yards for close to a century. The Oct. 1, 1920, issue of The Foundry, an engineering trade journal, lauded a facility where “the floor of the stock yard is paved with concrete, a feature which facilitates the work of the tractors used in hauling the charges to the cupola elevators.” Paved yards received even better press earlier, in the December 1918 issue of Industrial Management, The Engineering Magazine, which made these observations: “Concrete paved drives are a great incentive to orderliness. As soon as built a decided improvement is at once evident in the plant surroundings. Rubbish piles disappear. The driveway which formerly was a free-for-all scrap yard assumes the appearance of a street. … A concrete paved driveway is sanitary and [clean]. There are no holes or pockets in which stagnant water or refuse or rubbish will collect. The pavement can be easily swept clean or flushed and will always be in a sanitary condition. If grease or oil should be spilled on it, it can be swept or scraped off and there is no danger of the pavement absorbing any of it.” The benefits the articles identify are still the benefits scrapyards see from paving today, plus a few new ones: “Stormy Weather” wasn’t even a song in 1918, let alone something scrapyards needed to worry about for stormwater quality compliance. Even if you answer the question of whether to pave in the affirmative, you must decide on the specific approach you’ll take and, if it’s an existing yard, how you’ll adapt your operations during the paving and curing process.
Pros of Paving
When asked why they pave, consultants and scrapyard managers tend to emphasize three overlapping types of advantages: operational, environmental, and customer and community relations. Operationally, hard-surfaced yards are easier for heavy equipment such as trucks, tractors, and cranes to negotiate, especially when they need to turn around. It’s less likely a piece of metal will get embedded in the yard surface, which means fewer flat tires. And paved yards are less likely to have holes, which can be safety hazards for vehicles as well as tripping or falling hazards for employees or visitors. Another advantage “is the speed at which you can operate—not that we want people running at 100 miles per hour through the plant,” says Frank Cozzi, CEO of Cozzi O’Brien Recycling. His company is building a new scrapyard on a 10-acre tract adjacent to its Bellwood, Ill., headquarters. It expects to be able to salvage most of the existing concrete surface beneath 300,000 square feet of demolished buildings, but its other facilities are hard-surfaced, too. Paving “also helps to control the dust particulates you see in most unpaved yards,” Cozzi says, and it “cuts down our maintenance on trucks, tires, material-handling equipment, [and] cranes.” Those maintenance issues from unpaved yards relate to the aforementioned dust, which can impede an engine’s air intake and cooling and require more frequent air filter changes. Unpaved yards also cause more wear and tear on axles and wheels from muddy and uneven surfaces.
Environmentally, most point to how paving makes it significantly easier for a yard to comply with stormwater regulations. A hard surface keeps the rain that hits scrap material and equipment from going directly into the ground or a nearby body of water and carrying with it residual metals, oils, and other fluids and particulates. Such runoff can violate scrapyards’ obligations under the federal Clean Water Act and their related federal, state, or local discharge permits. A paved yard, in contrast, can direct water into a collection system where it can be cleaned before it’s discharged, reducing the likelihood of stormwater compliance problems. Fines for violating the CWA can run as high as $37,500 a day. A hard surface is easier on customer vehicles as well, and many companies tout that cold, hard fact in their marketing materials. “To help to prevent damage to your tires, we provide a concrete driving surface throughout the majority of our yard,” boasts the website of one Illinois scrap company. “You won’t ruin your tires at our facility.” Another scrap company in California proclaims the advantages of processing scrap metal on the 12- to 14-inch-thick concrete pads at its three yards: It allows the business to operate year-round, avoid operating in mud, and protect the ground.
Further, paved yards are easier to sweep and keep clean, these scrapyard operators say. “You don’t have mud issues causing premature wear to your equipment or irate neighbors because you’re tracking mud out into your streets,” Cozzi says. “We have a policy here that all exposed hard surfaces get swept every day—it just makes for a much cleaner and efficient operation.” At Upstate Shredding-Ben Weitsman (Owego, N.Y.), which has paved each of its 14 yards, “The aesthetics are very important for us, and the experience for the customer is so much better” with a paved yard, says owner Adam Weitsman. He also contends that paving helps Upstate give its steel mill customers better-quality, dirt-free scrap.
Hard Decisions
It’s much simpler to hard-surface a new facility than to pave over an existing one. “When we design a new facility, the site is surveyed, hydraulic models are used to calculate potential runoff, specific concrete loads are determined, and proper stormwater collection, control, and discharge structures are designed based on planned material storage,” Berndt says. Each paving plan is unique to that facility’s site layout and conditions, and the design process requires a high level of communication between engineers and scrapyard operators.
Retrofitting an existing yard is much more costly and complicated. You’ll need to analyze and properly handle the existing soil, which might mean absorbing the expense of properly disposing of it if you discover contamination. A further complication is how to do the paving and continue to operate. “Retrofitting a site with paving has to be patchwork,” Berndt says, “one section of the yard at a time, then you move on and do the next section, so it’s more time-consuming and certainly more expensive than starting from scratch.” Potential retrofitters must take into consideration how long they’ll need to wait before they can start using their newly paved surface. “Although you can include admixtures in concrete that can make it attain its strength much earlier, typically the quickest you can get back on it is seven days,” says Tim DeWitt, senior technical engineer at consulting firm August Mack Environmental (Indianapolis). Though it’s tempting to do this work when the yard might be slow or closed anyway—such as between Christmas and New Year’s Day—that might be a bad idea, DeWitt says. “If you do put it down in the wintertime, as the temperature falls below about 40 to 45 degrees [F], you have additional costs to keep concrete warm while it cures. You can put warming blankets on it, but that would ultimately drive up your cost.”
When scrapyard operators want to save money by only partially paving the yard, most concentrate on the areas around their shears and balers, places where “a lot of metal hits the road,” DeWitt says. Other priority paving spots include entrances, exits, stormwater control areas, and material storage areas that could produce contaminated runoff. Cozzi offers another cost-saving tip: In some cases you can do it yourself. “We just formed up the concrete forms and put down the wire rebar,” he says.
Once you’ve made the decision to hard-surface, the next is whether to pave with concrete or asphalt. The smart money usually goes with concrete, even though it’s more expensive. The costs of paving a scrapyard in concrete range from $8 to $12 a square foot, or roughly $350,000 to $500,000 an acre; asphalt is 30 to 50 percent less, according to various estimates. The nature of the underlying soil, how much granular fill is required, and the cost of reinforcements such as rebar are what determine whether the costs are at the higher or lower end of that range.
Most scrapyard operators say they prefer concrete because it’s hard enough to bear the heavy equipment and large trucks that could tear up asphalt, it lasts much longer than asphalt, and it’s less prone to warping or sinking. Asphalt also can react to substances frequently found in scrapyards. Spilled gasoline, for example, eats into asphalt and causes soft spots. Asphalt does have some pluses, however. Asphalt surfaces are more elastic and are less likely to crack in cold weather. And you can resurface asphalt by installing new layers on top of the original surface, which is much more cost-effective than the total removal and replacement required when concrete gives out. Upstate Shredding’s yards have concrete around the shredders and asphalt in other areas. Paving is “an expensive proposition, and I understand totally why people don’t do it—we’ve spent more on paving than we have on purchasing companies before,” Weitsman says.
Sadoff Iron & Metal Co. (Fond du Lac, Wis.) selected concrete with fiber mesh reinforcement for its new facility in Lincoln, Neb., scheduled to open in October. “We chose concrete for durability,” says David Borsuk, Sadoff’s environmental affairs and quality control manager. “Our experience is that asphalt is not as long-lived, and it does not work well if you want to form it for drainage swales.” Asphalt also wouldn’t work as well in areas of the yard designed for truck-turning radiuses, where heavy trucks and trailers would accelerate wear on the blacktop surface, he says. DeWitt says he recently chose concrete over asphalt for retrofitting a 100-year-old yard because of its greater hardness. “Our concern there was its ability to be able to wear and survive the heavy equipment loads that would be taken across it,” he says, noting that he used a higher-strength concrete—a formulation designed to bear 5,000 pounds per square inch instead of the traditional 3,000 to 4,000 psi—with concrete hardener to toughen the surface plus steel reinforcement and fiber to reduce microfractures in the concrete.
Installation Considerations
As Borsuk and DeWitt’s examples indicate, the selection of concrete over asphalt leads to the next question: What formulation of concrete? At least one company touts the value of fiber-reinforced concrete in addition to or instead of rebar, saying it makes scrapyard concrete tougher. “A good majority of the scrapyards we’ve spoken to are using a concrete strength that’s better suited for a sidewalk, typically a standard 4,000- to 5,000-psi mix,” says Christian Rescate, vice president, sales and marketing, at Nycon (Fairless Hills, Pa.), which produces fibers for secondary reinforcement in many products, including concrete and asphalt. “We have a concrete mix design that is 9,000 to 11,000 psi, and it also includes a [polyvinyl alcohol] fiber additive. The PVA makes the concrete tougher and more resistant to damage from impact and abrasion. The PVA fibers develop a molecular bond with the concrete that turns it into a composite, which is much tougher than plain concrete.” Nycon claims this TuffSlab concrete lasts up to five times longer than standard 4,000-psi concrete. The company does not do the paving; instead, it helps scrapyard operators design their slabs and then supplies mix designs to local concrete suppliers.
Proper installation is essential, scrapyard operators point out. Unless the concrete and asphalt are poured correctly, the new pavement will be quickly destroyed, Weitsman warns. “You have to make it thick enough to handle the weight,” he says. “The sub-base is the key. You have to have a strong sub-base, and you also really need to look at topography so that the runoff goes into the proper areas—make sure it slopes in the right directions” to meet your stormwater control needs. That sub-base material also should be free-draining, whether you use concrete or asphalt on top, DeWitt adds. “If you don’t have a freely draining sub-base material, and water gets trapped in that sub-base, whenever it freezes, it’s able to lift up the pavement surface,” he says.
The Soft Option
Environmental consultants can be useful resources when you begin the process of deciding whether to pave your yard with something tougher than good intentions. They can also address the potential costs of not paving. “I wouldn’t ever want to advise anybody to budget for fines,” Berndt says, but “if you’re in a more arid climate, [and] you don’t have a lot of rainwater, it might be more practical to take a close look at not paving.” He cautions, however, that “you would need to take into account a lot of things” when making such a decision, including the size of your yard, how much water it generates, and what you’ll do with that water to ensure you meet the requirements of your stormwater permit. “There are scenarios where paving might not be a good or an economical idea,” Berndt says, but he makes one further observation: “Once a facility is paved, everybody seems to take care of the yard better. There’s an efficiency and a cleanliness that comes along, probably because of the investment. Employees are neater, they’re more organized—particularly at the [yards] we’ve done from scratch.”
Theodore Fischer is a writer based in Silver Spring, Md.