The number that makes this a construction story rather than a waste story: 2.5 million pounds of construction and demolition material went to recycling instead of landfill, on a building whose entire job is to sort other people’s garbage.
King County Executive Girmay Zahilay opened the South County Recycling and Transfer Station in Algona on August 27. It replaces the neighboring Algona Transfer Station, an open-air canopy structure built in the 1960s that offered no recycling streams at all. KLB Construction was the general contractor, with HDR holding the prime design contract and JRMA doing programming and early design.
What 84,000 square feet buys
The program is bigger than the word “transfer station” suggests: a 36,000-square-foot commercial tip floor, an interior 18-space public self-haul area, three loadouts including two compactors, twelve enclosed trailer bays with three-day storage, and a separate stand-alone facility for household and business hazardous waste with a covered drive-through and a reuse center. Permitted throughput is roughly 700 tons a day, rising to 966 by 2043.
Nuisance control drove much of the design. The structure is fully enclosed and manages its own airflow, with misters for dust and odor, sound-barrier walls, sound-absorbing landscaping, extra driving lanes and compaction equipment that cycles vehicles through faster. Anyone who has sited a transfer station near housing knows those are the line items that determine whether the permit survives the hearing.
The sustainability package, and what’s actually certified
Solar covers 74% of the roof, which the county says is its largest array at any facility and expects will supply more than half the building’s operating energy. There are building-integrated photovoltaics on the south exposure and battery storage for charging and operations. Rooftop cisterns hold 20,000 gallons of rainwater reused for rinsing floors. Skylights and solar tubes handle daylighting. The project also realigned and enhanced a creek on the 7.83-acre site.
Two certifications, with different standing. Salmon-Safe certification from Salmon-Safe Puget Sound is awarded, covering habitat restoration and water quality. Energy Petal certification under the International Living Future Institute’s Living Building Challenge is being pursued, not held. The energy and diversion figures above are all the county’s own, published in a ribbon-cutting release.
Why the diversion number is the interesting one
Rooftop solar on a public building is now unremarkable. Diverting 2.5 million pounds of your own C&D waste is harder, because it requires separation discipline from every trade on site for the length of the job, and it costs money on the front end that shows up as an avoided tipping fee somebody else books.
The cheapest version of construction waste diversion is not building anything new. Cleveland’s $120 million conversion of the 1902 Rose Building into apartments and a hotel keeps a 378,000-square-foot structure standing that a redevelopment would have put in a landfill. Neither approach shows up in an energy model, and both are the real number.
Sources: Auburn Examiner and KLB Construction.