"The bottom line is they provide a great service from a construction-waste standpoint," said Jim Kerr, a contract manager and director of sustainability at IMC Construction Inc. in Malvern. "This is a business. It's not like people are willing to pay a huge premium to have their trash recycled."
"We use them for our construction waste whether it's a LEED project or not," said Kerr, referring to the Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification program. "We don't pay more for them. I can tell you that."
Still, Kerr and other construction managers said Revolution Recovery had distinguished itself through its persistence in finding outlets for materials that would otherwise end up in a landfill.
"We found that they were ahead of the pack in terms of the amount of waste they could recycle from a job site and the fact that they provided the best documentation back to us as to where the material ended up," said Mike O'Brien, vice president of business development at W.S. Cumby Inc., a builder in Springfield, Delaware County, that was one of Revolution Recovery's first customers.
In September, Revolution Recovery won a leadership award from the Delaware Valley Green Building Council.
Even outside the green-building sector, waste has become a bigger concern.
"The issue of waste and the issue of what to do with construction debris used to not be an issue at all," said Walter P. Palmer 3d, president and chief executive of the General Building Contractors Association in Philadelphia. "Now every prime contractor thinks about 'what am I going to do with this stuff?' "
Despite that industry shift, Palmer expressed skepticism about how big construction-waste recycling can get.
