Editor’s Note: Diverted: Tracing the path of recycling in Whatcom County is a multipart series that follows waste from curbside to commodity market. Find previous stories here.
Wood and construction debris make up almost a quarter of the waste stream in Washington, around 1.2 million tons annually. Drywall, lumber, shingles and concrete take up a lot of space in landfills but have ample potential for reuse or recycling.
Recyclers view the waste generated by construction and demolition (C&D) as one of the biggest opportunities for diversion, second only to organic compostable waste.
Lautenbach Recycling processes between 1,200 and 1,500 tons of C&D material a month at its sorting facility in Mount Vernon. President Troy Lautenbach said a significant percentage of the material that comes over the scales is being hauled down from Whatcom County.
In 1991 Lautenbach started a business grinding up drywall and combining it with sawdust to make cattle bedding. He and his brother Torrey built the Mount Vernon C&D sorting facility in 2009, and the company has expanded into a suite of Skagit- and Whatcom County-based businesses that include recycling, hauling, commercial composting and storage container rental, as well as transfer stations in Ferndale, Mount Vernon and Friday Harbor on San Juan Island.
[ Read more: What makes Whatcom’s trash and recycling system unusual? ]
The C&D sorting facility is open to contractors and self-haulers and accepts concrete, wood, asphalt shingles, drywall, wiring and all kinds of metal. Six to eight operators sort through mixed loads by hand, separating the material into various streams.
Concrete is ground up to be reused as aggregate, asphalt shingles are repurposed into road base, gypsum is made into new drywall, scrap metal is recycled and wood is either mulched on site and sold for landscaping, or sent to regional paper mills for biomass fuel.
“When there’s a market for plastic, we’ll pull it but that’s a tough one,” Lautenbach said. “But plastic only makes up a small volume of the C&D material we get.”
He would like to see more C&D recycling in Whatcom. It’s cheaper than landfilling and he believes customers “want to do the right thing” and keep bulky, recyclable debris out of the waste stream.
A family-owned transfer station in Ferndale, Recycling & Disposal Services (RDS), operated a small scale C&D sorting room from 2016 to early 2020, but didn’t have enough volume to continue the practice.
RDS still separates out concrete, wood and metal that gets tossed at the transfer station to process or sell, and recently implemented a “mixed waste recycling” program to more thoroughly sort mixed materials that contain recyclables. The sorting room conveyor belt will be moved onto the main tipping floor and RDS employees will be able to pull recyclables out, similar to the sorting line at Lautenbach Recycling’s C&D facility.
Whatcom County’s “flow control” ordinance ensures that revenue generated by solid waste from tipping fees and taxes stays within the county, but the ordinance has exemptions for recycling and C&D. William McCarter, the manager of RDS, would like to see the ordinance updated so that C&D is no longer exempt, which would make sorting construction debris locally more financially viable.
Jennifer Hayden, the solid waste supervisor at Whatcom County Health and Community Services, confirmed the county is expected to review and update the ordinance sometime in the future.
Meanwhile, the City of Bellingham is working with nonprofit Sustainable Connections to study the possibility of requiring contractors to recycle C&D, and the county could follow suit. Seattle and King County are among the only jurisdictions in the state that mandate some kinds of C&D recycling.
As part of its Toward Zero Waste program, Sustainable Connections offers technical guidance to contractors for reducing waste on the job site. But for now, it’s a voluntary program — builders can simply chuck all their trash in one dumpster to be hauled off to a landfill, if they choose.
But Nate Witham, who manages the salvage program at the RE Store in Bellingham, knows that when it comes to the “three Rs,” reuse is preferable to recycle. Processing old material into new requires more energy and can generate waste, whereas the careful extraction and reclamation of building materials is more efficient.
The store, run by the nonprofit RE Sources, diverts an estimated 2.7 million pounds of material from the landfill annually. The RE Store salvage crew has decades of combined experience with deconstruction projects big and small. Instead of sending one worker to a job site to “crunch” a structure with an excavator then pick through the debris for salvageable material, the crew systematically dismantles a building from the inside out, removing fixtures, cabinets, trim and flooring, then taking on the structural elements.
“The thing that’s funny to me is that using salvaged material is the ‘new hip thing,’ when really it’s the oldest idea in the whole world,” Witham said. “So many buildings in Europe are built out of Roman roads.”
The RE Store operation is currently limited by space — all those reusable cabinets, trim, lumber and fixtures take up a lot of room in the business’s 20,000-square-foot retail store and warehouse.
“If we started growing and building and getting more projects, we could potentially rent another warehouse space to have material in,” Witham said.
In 2023, Seattle received a $4 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a central lumber warehouse. That’s the dream, Witham said — his ideal facility in Bellingham would be an abandoned Kmart, a huge single-story open space where RE Store can process, sort, store and sell lumber and other bulky but high-value salvaged goods.
With home prices so high now, Witham said that buyers with the means won’t settle for less than “perfect,” and that often means ripping out completely functional interiors to achieve their aesthetic vision, or even buying properties and demolishing the existing structures to build anew. While some owners use RE Store’s crew or get more creative and relocate their homes, no local regulations mandate deconstruction.
“If people were incentivized, that would make us more competitive,” Witham said. “The problem is we have to compete with one guy in an excavator who can crunch a house in a day.”
There are minor tax incentives in deconstructing buildings instead of trashing them, but Witham believes the benefits aren’t just financial. One of his favorite projects involved salvaging old-growth lumber from a Bellingham house built in the 1890s. The lumber likely came from a single massive tree, part of the ancient groves that once stretched all the way to the bay.
“Preserving the material and the history of the material is very important,” he said. “For the trees that were here and aren’t here anymore, and now the old houses that are going away, salvaging them is a way of honoring the past into the future, I suppose.”
A previous version of this story stated Whatcom County will review its flow control ordinance in 2025, but the county currently has no timeline on policy changes. This story was updated to reflect the change at 1:30 p.m. Dec. 9, 2024. Cascadia Daily News regrets the error.
Julia Tellman writes about civic issues and anything else that happens to cross her desk; contact her at juliatellman@cascadiadaily.com.
