The Devens Recycling Center in Massachusetts is dubbed the largest fully enclosed construction and demolition (C&D) transfer station in the U.S.
The facility features six bays and accepts about 400 tons of material daily from C&D waste haulers and debris producers. About 50 to 70 percent of that material gets recycled to secondary markets.
In 2020, Devens is expanding its business by starting a solar energy company and is in discussions with smaller C&D transfer stations in an effort to help them grow their businesses and increase the amount of C&D materials recycled throughout the state.
Wicked Local has more information:
Perched on top of a mountain of discarded construction and demolition materials, an excavator with a grapple bucket picks through the debris and places it into a conveyor belt system.
The system, consisting of manual labor and a series of different-sized conveyor belts, sorts these materials, including asphalt, brick, concrete, shingles, gypsum, metal, wood and cardboard.
The materials are then dropped into holding bays for further sorting.
Once this process is completed and the material grounded into shape, the newly made recyclable is ready to be transported to secondary markets. For example, recycled wood becomes wood chips to be used as a fuel source while concrete gets crushed to be used as a road base and landscaping materials.
All these machinations take place in a 90,000-square-foot building that serves as the centerpiece of the Devens Recycling Center - the largest fully enclosed state-of-the-art construction and demolition (C&D) transfer station in the United States.