Zero-Waste Pavement Plant On Tap

A local road construction company plans to build a recycling facility near the Mill River to convert torn-up and discarded pavement into roadway patching material — while creating no new waste in the process.

Jeffrey Laydon of Laydon Industries described his family business’s planned new recycling work at Tuesday night’s regular monthly Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) meeting on the ground floor of 200 Orange St.

Laydon and local attorney Jim Segaloff appeared before the commissioners to support a special exception application by East Street Development LLC, a holding company owned by Laydon. The exception would allow for an industrial use not currently covered by the city’s zoning regulations at 59 New St., 517 Grand Ave., 539 Grand Ave., and Railroad Avenue.

That new use is an apparently preternaturally efficient recycling process that allows for ripped up roadway waste to be repurposed as a warm mix that can be applied, during any season, to patch utility cuts and other bumpy, worn out stretches of pavement.

“Our process uses 100 percent of the mix and we make 100 percent of the final product,” Laydon said. ​“We generate no waste. It’s a good sustainable option for something that everyone’s generating and doing nothing with.”

“I’m not aware of any other facility in the Northeast or in the United States which is currently doing what this facility has the capability of doing, which is using entirely 100 percent recycled material,” said Clinton-based environmental site assessment consultant Darby Hittle (pictured).

“It represents one of the single greatest potentials in Connecticut right now for reducing waste.”

Click here to download the BZA staff report on Laydon’s application.

Laydon’s company purchased the four parcels spanning roughly five acres along the western shore of the Mill River back in 2016 from Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, which had used the site to manufacture rubber and plastic tape before shutting down its local factory in 2003.

“The site was probably one of the filthiest, most disgusting sites — and we’ve had a few here — in New Haven,” Segaloff said about the former Saint-Gobain location.

He said that then-Mayor Toni Harp and city economic development staffers called Laydon, whose road paving company is based out of 51 Longhini Lane near the West Haven border, to see if he would be up for buying the site, helping finish the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) required clean up, and putting it to more productive use.

Segaloff said that he and Laydon went before the City Plan Commission in 2014 and in 2017 to get the necessary approvals to lay an asphalt cap over most of the site.

Now that that work is largely done, Laydon’s company is near ready to repurpose the site’s existing 29,000 square-foot building to house the machinery necessary to recycle road waste.

Laydon said after the meeting that every contractor and every municipality currently stockpiles ripped up pavement waste wherever they can all over the state. Roughly 20 percent of this waste in Connecticut is currently being recycled, he said, while the remaining 80 percent goes into larger stockpiles or into landfills.

“We’ve been designing the equipment to handle this problem for roughly 10 years,” he said.

“We’ve started using our own surplus to start the process and, eventually, if the need for the patching material develops, then we could be using New Haven’s surplus” that the city’s Department of Public Works generates every year when it mills and paves city streets.

He said the site currently has such a mobile version of the recycling machine up and running. In fact, his company used it to apply the asphalt cap atop part of the New Street and Grand Avenue parcels. When he saw how well the process was working, Laydon said, he decided to apply to the city to keep the machinery and recycling program there permanently.

Once the site is up and running at full capacity, Laydon said, the roadway waste would be brought from his company’s existing stockpile to a separate facility, where it would be ground up into smaller pieces. Those pieces would then be brought to the new New Street-Grand Avenue facility, where they would be converted into a warm mix that could then be trucked back out to city streets and laid down as roadway patches.

“It’s one of the only applications that you can look at and say, we use 100 percent waste product and generate 100 percent usable product,” he said.

How many workers will this new facility employ? asked BZA Commissioner Ann Stone.

Only four to six, Laydon replied. But, he added, that number is deceptively low. That’s because his current road paving business currently has to lay off most of its workers every winter because the existing cold mixes on the market cannot be applied as patches to roadways during the cold months.

Since this new recycling facility will be creating a warm mix, he said, his company will be able to keep more road paving workers employed during the winter months.

“So when the roadway breaks up, you’ve found a way to utilize waste to pave the roadways in the wintertime?” asked BZA Commissioner Shirl Wilkins (pictured at right, with Stone).

“That’s really the prime target for the process,” Laydon said.

He said that has succeeded in creating a 100 percent efficient road waste recycling process when so many other companies around the country have failed for a simple reason: scale. Small scale, that is.

“Large facilities have trouble incorporating large volumes of recycled products because of production limitations,” he said. ​“We’re not trying to make the large scale products. We specifically designed this for the recycle application. Although we can’t produce even a small fraction of what large facilities produce, what we do produce is 100 percent recycled.”

City Environmental Advisory Council (EAC) Chair Laura Cahn (pictured) testified that Laydon had invited her to the facility, given her a tour, and explained the recycling process from start to finish in layperson’s terms.

“I can tell you that there was no noise, no odor,” she said, ​“and the fact that it is something where we are using stuff that already exists that we can’t do anything else with to make something new, we should commend Jeff Laydon and the people he works with for inventing such a process.”

The commissioners referred the special exception application to the City Plan Commission, which will then pass it back to the BZA for a final vote next month. Segaloff said that the Laydon must then go back to the City Plan Commission later this year in order to get site plan approval before he can begin using the site as a permanent recycling facility.