Recycling California Land into a Recycling Center

By Tony Shen and Steve Salzman

The town of Samoa is situated on a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and Humboldt Bay in Northern California. The area has had various timber-related uses since the late 1800s, including two pulp mills, a sawmill, an ash landfill, a railroad and a mill town.

Except for a neighboring pulp mill, commercial activity ceased long ago, bringing blight and disrepair to much of the area. The area retains a striking natural beauty but suffers from real and perceived contamination from past industrial operations. Housing and infrastructure require substantial upgrades.

The County of Humboldt partnered with a private developer who purchased the area to redevelop it for mixed uses. Key to the revitalization plans was the receipt of a U.S. EPA Brownfield Assessment Pilot grant.

Central to the county’s redevelopment plans is a 17-acre eco-industrial park that will provide needed industrial space in an environmentally friendly manner. Funded by a Community Development Block Grant, the county commissioned a feasibility study of the park, developing green building design guidelines for individual buildings and the park as a whole and recommending green options and incentive programs.

The site already has an anchor tenant that aligns beautifully with the eco-theme committed — a regional recyclable materials processing center. The center will consist of approximately 12,000 square feet of warehouse space and approximately 3,000 square feet of offices, employee areas and a recycling educational center. Construction is about to begin.

The building will be designed and constructed using the LEED process and is expected to be certified at the Gold level. The LEED commissioning was partially funded by a U.S. EPA brownfield grant and will serve as a model for other green commercial buildings throughout the county. The structure will be mostly steel (with high recycled content) and galvanized or painted to hold up to the marine environment. The engineered fill under the slab foundation may include tire shreds. Recycled crumb rubber will be used in the cushioning and insulating mats at the sorting stations, as bumpers in the loading docks and parking lots, and possibly in the asphalt mix for the parking lot and driveways.

The sorting stations will have insulated (sound and thermal) enclosures with clear plastic tops to allow conditioning and ventilation of the workspace without conditioning of the entire warehouse. The warehouse roof and walls will have translucent panels to provide daylight some windows to provide views.

The offices, employee facilities and education center will also have plentiful daylighting, natural ventilation and soundproofing. The educational center will have views out into the processing area as well as closed-circuit television monitors inside the sorting station enclosures. The education center is designed for school children to learn about recycling and waste management programs.

The project represented a union of the private developer, county and community along with funding from the U.S. EPA and CDBG. The county is attempting to launch a redevelopment agency to facilitate the final steps in the development process and may seek secondary funding for construction. Development of the eco-industrial park and rest of the Samoa area should begin later in 2005 and take place over the next several years.

Tony Shen is financing and infrastructure coordinator for the County of Humboldt, Calif. Steve Salzman, PE, is senior project manager with Winzler and Kelly, Consulting Engineers.

 

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