Worthwhile recycling effort
Recycling is more than just household efforts to collect for repurposing items like plastic bottles, aluminum cans, paper and cardboard. Industrial recycling programs such as one proposed in the Turtle Creek Valley can turn industrial waste into a usable product, a profitable operation and a source of tax revenue.
Beemsterboer Slag Corp., of Hammond, Ind., plans to convert an old employee parking lot of the former Westinghouse Electric complex in North Versailles into a mobile slag recycling operation. The company will take slag — a waste byproduct of steel production — from the nearby U.S. Steel Edgar Thomson Works, crush it and recycle it for use in road construction, parking lots and similar applications.
The company, operating under the name Pittsburgh Rock LLC, got the Edgar Thomson contract after the steelmaker put the work out for bid. It expects to process about 400,000 tons of slag a year.
That’s a lot of waste product that might otherwise be sitting on-site at the steel plant, or taken to landfills.
Recycling slag has become a common practice over the years, turning the waste into aggregate in the manufacture of asphalt and concrete, notably for road construction projects.
Beemsterboer has been doing slag work at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works in Gary, Ind., a long time and has a multiyear lease for the 10-acre former Westinghouse site. Company officials said they expect to be in operation here for several years, as long as the Edgar Thomson plant continues to produce steel.
Although it won’t be a huge operation, the $5 million investment brings some jobs to the area — 16 drivers and 10 workers on-site — as well as additional tax revenue for North Versailles. And by setting up the operation as a “mobile” site, there is not a significant amount of prep work needed to begin processing the slag.
The Pittsburgh Rock operation is an example of using parts of what was a mammoth industrial site for smaller industries — ones that can help rebuild a community’s tax base piece by piece.