A new road: RPEI of Peru, Ind., takes a different path to C&D recycling success

Construction & Demolition Recycling, July-August, 2004 by William Turley

Finding the niche. That has been the secret to success for Recycling & Processing Equipment Inc. (RPEI), a contract grinding company and equipment distributor.

"If you are going to do what everybody else does, how successful can you be?" asks Gary Davis, general manager of the Peru, Ind.-based company. "We want to do something nobody else is doing. Then we can establish the market. We want to be in the forefront of things, not in the back."

To that end, the company does process wood and other everyday infeed materials, as any other contract grinder would. But RPEI specializes in recycling asphalt shingles, gypsum, and even more offbeat items, such as animal carcasses for composting. The company also has entered the contract crushing market and is trying to expand that sector.

AN EQUIPMENT ANGLE

Bur grinding and selling grinders is how Mark Bowyer, owner of RPEI, cut his teeth in the business, starting in 1989.

He bought his first unit, a Rexworks (now Terex) Maxigrind to service a large demolition job in nearby Kokomo, Ind. The contractor wanted volume reduction in order to ship the demolition material more efficiently to the landfill.

Somone saw the unit working, thought it was a great idea, so Bower sold it to him and bought a second Maxigrinder.

The same thing happened at the next job he placed the grinder on. Then Rexworks approached him because he had already sold more than the current dealer in the state, and the equipment manufacturer wanted him to handle its grinder sales in the territory. By the time RPEI was installing its third grinder, Davis had been hired and has been with the company ever since.

Today, RPEI's contract grinding business has done work virtually all over the country, according to Davis, but primarily stays east of the Mississippi River. "We have worked a lot from Cranston, R.I., to Key West, Fla.," Davis says. But what the company does on those jobs has been evolving, he adds.

CLOSED LOOP

It used to be that a lot of the grinding work was only for volume reduction, and sometimes some of the brick and block would be used to fill in a basement or help bring the site to grade. "But from the late 1990s to now, we are usually grinding [to make] an end product."

About 90 percent of the revenue RPEI receives comes from contract grinding. That means the end product RPEI is making is usually not its own, if only because the grinders are working so far from home and it can he difficult to find a local market for the material, says Davis.

Wood has been the bread-and-butter material for the company for all these years, both grinding for others and at the company's site in rural Peru. "We do a lot of mulch products now," Davis says. "With our roll-off business, we bring a lot of wood into our site. A lot of it is pallets and white wood from a truss factory, out of which we make an inch-minus animal bedding or some kind of mulch. There are no cogeneration plants near enough to us to justify making burn fuel."

To this day wood remains a major component of RPEI's recycling mix. But so many companies began recycling wood that Bower, who says he likes challenges, began looking for newer markets. "In 1996 we ground our first asphalt shingle," Bower says. "We want to pursue shingle grinding more. We drink there is a business opportunity there."

Davis points out that only 5 percent of the mix for asphalt is the usual specification for asphalt shingles use in hot mix, and that limits recycled shingle use in that market. "We want to align ourselves with innovators around the country who are trying to go beyond hot mix," Davis says. "They have other uses for the material, such as road sealers, roof sealants and other added-value products."

Davis believes that the tremendous amount of shingle scrap out there means there is a huge need for these new markers. He thinks that many current shingle recyclers are processing only one-quarter of the shingles they receive, leaving a lot of potential lying on the ground at their sites.

The new markets RPEI wants to work to develop, such as uses in patio blocks, bricks and sound deadeners, can be shown to potential customers as places to divert the shingles. "We then will work with the Construction Materials Recycling Association to promote this," says Davis.

EAT MY (DRYWALL) DUST

Another market RPEI is bullish on is gypsum processing. The company has ground material in Fort Dodge, Iowa, for wallboard manufacturers there so the material could be used in new drywall. "The paper would just dissolve, we were grinding so fine," says Davis. RPEI also has ground gypsum for land application.

Whatever the end product, Davis says grinding gypsum is easy on the grinder but a dusty job. "We have used a lot of water to control the dust, but that only gets about 50 percent of it," says Davis. "It all depends on the state of the gypsum. If it is in big piles, stacked up in sheets, it will be pretty dusty. If it has been laid out thinner than that and outside where it received some rain, it will be gypsum mud. The latter won't raise dust, but is difficult to process, and you can't do much with it."