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Creteheads, Owen Blevins ConcreteAnswers.TV bringing you the internet’s most passionate show about concrete plants and equipment. Today we've got Doug Ruhlin from Resource Management Associates - www.RMAgreen.com - at the corporate headquarters of ConcreteAnswers.TV. Doug is an environmental consultant with resource management associates. Of course you've seen him at several state associations where he's been a speaker, NRMCA, he'll be speaking in 2011 at CONEXPO-CON/AGG, uh he's published an in-focus magazine. He's all over the place. He's an advocate for the environment and water in our industry, of course, which is concrete and aggregates. So getting right to it Doug want to talk to you a little about uh, why uh, management of uh, return concrete is so important to today's producer. That's a great, a great question Owen. You know um, return concrete a big problem at the ready mix plant. Um, everybody's got it and uh, it can really affect the overall environmental program at a concrete plant. There's certainly, there's rules and regulations to deal with the and require the effect of management. From everything, from your storm water discharge permit, that requires best management practices to deal with this material. Um, there's regulations that deal with process water which would be the water that you might generate in washing this material out of the back of a mixer, for example. There could be solid waste regulations, there could even be hazardous waste regulations if the material was very much mismanaged or mishandled. So there's a lot of regulations out there that affect it. Um, i-it, it really, it fits in with the overall environmental program at a plant, very, very important with a plant. Um, talk to me if you would a little bit about the um, available solutions for producers today. M'kay. There, there are a variety of options um, that are available to deal with the return concrete problem at a plant. Some are better than others depending upon the specific uh, facility. Um, and they range, a couple that I'm going to point out, the y range from everything from making blocks, very common most producers make blocks. Um, uh, sometimes they sell them um, they these returns on investment deals with a problem in a very nice way. Um, hardened concrete recycling is very common as well. Producer brings back the excess concrete, pours it on the ground, ribbons it out, busts it up and makes recycled concrete aggregate which can be very lucrative in some markets. It can be a great solution to the problem. And then you have uh, concrete reclaimers and concrete reclaimers can be a very effective tool to deal with returned concrete. Um, they recover the-the aggregate out of the return concrete there by provide a lot of value on that, you know by recovering that aggregate. And as we've discussed before I mean reclaimers aren't for everybody. Um, but, give me an example of how a reclaimer can fit into a producers operation. M'kay. In the right setting a reclaimer can pay a lot of benefits. Can really be an effective tool in deal with this and other environmental problems out at the plant? Um, unlike most of the other solutions that I mentioned a concrete reclaimer is just about the only of the solutions that can really deal effectively with not only the return concrete problem by minimizing the volume by effectively dealing with it, by recovering the aggregate out providing the value there. But it can also deal with process water out of the plant. Really-really be an effective tool at dealing with process water management out there. Um, it can reduce the amount of process water. It can be an effective way of managing process water, finding a home for the process water out there. And I think one of the other additional benefits a reclaimer can pay is that in the right setting in process. The buck as you say out there. Can give you a way of managing that and disposing of that. And you know that's a very rare big problem at most ready-mix plants. So it's one of the few of the options that we talked about that really gives you a really intergraded holistic solution to the problem in the right setting. Good, well Doug as always I really appreciate your insight into a pretty complex subject here, so listen, what I recommend with you guys, creteheads, take a look at ConcreteAnswers.TV. Get back to us with some questions, thoughts, comments. Thanks for your response from Mid Atlantic Concrete Equipment, maconcrete.com, they've got some great resources as well for you. I'm going to put Doug's website below, ResourceManagementAssoc, so you can check his site out. He's a great resource and please use him. Again until next time, we'll talk to you later.
