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Aggregate: On Rocky Ground |
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Written On: November/December 2004 |
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Written By: by Daniel Brunell |
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AGGREGATE (ag•gre•gate) n. Composed mixture of minerals separable by mechanical means. The mineral materials, such as sand or stone, are used in making concrete and asphalt.
The Romans were the first to discover the greatness of aggregate. With aggregate, the Romans built many of their wonders such as the aqueducts, the Parthenon, the Coliseum, Hadrian’s Wall, and even their extensive road network. For the Romans, aggregate played as much of an important part of their civilization as their legions and civil government.
Today the times might be different, but for our modern society aggregate plays as much of a vital role as it did in ancient Rome. Look around you. All the roads you drive on are made from aggregate, either concrete or asphalt. The schools your children learn in, the stores you shop in, and even the office you work in, all have an extensive amount of concrete in them. Even some of our most recognizable structures such as Grand Coulee Dam and the I-90 floating bridges are made of aggregate.
Washington State Ideal for Aggregate
Washington state is one of the national leaders in aggregate production. The glaciers from the last ice age carved massive amounts of material and deposited them in the Puget Sound area in deltas from Friday Harbor to Olympia. With this amazing resource, you think that the Washington state aggregate industry is in good shape. Not quite. The industry hasn’t been hit hard by the recent economic slowdown, the price of oil, or anything of that nature. The industry has been crippled by over-regulation and the NIMBY syndrome (not-in-my-backyard).
“The industry as a whole, statewide, is always facing continuing challenges with permitting and opening sand, gravel, asphalt and concrete processing faculties,” said Bruce Chattin, executive director of the Washington Aggregate and Concrete Association. “A typical permitting time line is seven to 10 years at a cost of $750,000 to $1,000,000 a year to get aggregate resources fully permitted.” On average, it takes more than 51 permits to get a site located. Permits can then be appealed by any neighbor, even those who may have moved in next to a mine that was already operating. Politicians can side with the neighbors to carry favor. All of this adds up to increased cost for important public projects.
A company that has had particular problems with its permitting is Glacier Northwest of Seattle. In business since opening up their Steilacoom operations in 1895, the company has won a plethora of awards ranging from community involvement to environmental stewardship. Despite its record of excellence, King County has denied Glacier Northwest key permits for their Maury Island facility. This area is already zoned for mining and designated mineral lands under the county’s own GMA Comprehensive Plan.
“King County has done everything and anything to stop this project,” said Ron Summers of Glacier Northwest. The project involves rebuilding of their aggregate loading dock at Maury Island, one of the few remaining aggregate sites in King County and the only remaining site with water access. The mine has been in operation since the 1940s and has a dock for barges to transport aggregate off the island. Glacier Northwest wants to retrofit the dock to bring it up to modern standards.
King County, however, has blocked the necessary shoreline permits for the project. “King County found there were no environmental impacts, but at the last minute, it said that our operations on the islands were not water dependent,” Summers added. “How are we supposed to get aggregate off the island?”
The state Shorelines Hearings Board later overturned this decision concluding that the project is water dependent. King County then asked the Board to remand the permit, to start the permitting process all over again, wasting six precious years and $4 million of the applicant’s money. A ruling is still pending on this matter, but no matter what the outcome, the delays have been costly to all participants and the public.
Industry Frustrated by Permitting Process
This frustration in King County has lead many aggregate companies to leave. “King County is getting a large amount of its aggregate from other parts of the Puget Sound and British Columbia, thus adding to the cost of aggregate in King County,” Summers added. “This attitude towards the aggregate industry has cost the county millions of dollars in tax revenue, transportation and construction cost and hundreds of jobs from their aggressive stance against the aggregate industry.”
Contrary to what many in King County and elsewhere might think, the aggregate industry is environmentally sound. “Our industry has responded quite well, and I am proud to state that our industry has moved significantly forward in our role in environmental stewardship and environmental protection,” Chattin said. Many sites that used to be aggregate quarries are now parks, recreational areas or have been restored to their natural state. For example, the Twin Lakes in Arlington and many lakes that are along I-5 were once the sand and gravel mines that were used to construct I-5. Now they serve as parks and community lakes. Current aggregate operations are very restricted on the amount of materials they are allowed to have exposed and worked on at a time. On top of this stewardship, many aggregate companies are being proactive and participating in many environmental projects across the state.
One of the aggregate companies leading the way in environmental stewardships is Fred Hill Materials of Poulsbo. “As a society, we absolutely can and must conduct commerce in a healthy, ecological manner,” said Alex Hill, president and CEO of Fred Hill Materials. “The real risk lies in not balancing human needs with that of the environment, and thereby needlessly sacrificing economic growth, living wages for families, and a quality of life that sustains the very ability to protect the environment.” In recent years, Fred Hill has joined forces with the Puget Sound Beach Restoration Fund. Fred Hill has pledged more than 500,000 tons of sand and gravel for beach restoration projects around Puget Sound. Based on current estimates this donation will restore approximately 17 miles of damaged shorelines.
Proposed Pit-to-Pier Would Help Environment
In the last five years, Fred Hill Materials has been working on a proposed project called pit-to-pier that would meet critical regional demands for sand and gravel. The project would add marine delivery capabilities to the company’s longstanding truck-based operation on the Olympic Peninsula by building a finger pier five miles south of the Hood Canal Bridge. Sand and gravel located onshore in the middle of a vast commercial tree farm would be quietly and unobtrusively transported to the remote pier site via a four-mile conveyor. The new pier would be utilized for more than 40 years and bring more than 130 family wage jobs to the area.
Fred Hill plans to build a conveyor belt from their pit to a newly constructed pier to offload aggregate onto a waiting barge. Seeing that each barge can carry up to 156 truck-and-trailer loads (the larger barges can carry up to an equivalent of 625 truckloads) of aggregate, this will help the fragile road system in the area and help the environment by taking trucks off busy roads.
Fred Hill has been proactive in with this project, working with environmental engineers to design a pier that doesn’t hurt fragile eel grass beds in the Hood Canal. Also, they have been proactive with local and state governments, meeting with them before proposing ideas, trying to make this project work for all involved. With all of this effort on the behalf of Fred Hill, they still face years of environmental review at local, state and federal levels.
Local residents have protested and have politicized the project trying to make it an environmental hot button. “There’s a difference between colorful exaggerations and straight-forward facts,” says Dan Baskins, project manager for Fred Hill. “Some have attempted to ‘catastrophize’ routine commerce to further their personal and political agendas.”
This attitude is slowly rotting away an industry. Since 1985, only 30 new surface quarries have been permitted while over 700 have been depleted or reclaimed. With an ever increasing population requiring more and more demand for aggregate, something needs to be done to remedy these problems. If current trends continue, we just might run out of rock and dirt to build with.
SIDEBAR
79,000,000 tons of aggregate, in the form of concrete and asphalt, are consumed by Washington state construction projects every year.
Due to the perishable nature of concrete and asphalt, mixing facilities are usually located within a 45-minute drive of a construction site.
The typical cost of a 50-acre aggregate facility is $5,000,000. It may take more than five years to permit such a facility in Washington.
A four-lane country road will use 85,000 tons of aggregate for a single mile.
Since 1985, only 30 new surface mine facilities have been permitted, while almost 700 have been depleted or reclaimed. Surface mining is only an interim use of the land.
According to the Departments of Ecology and Natural Resources, it may take as many as 32 state permits, 12 federal permits, and 7 local permits (not to mention site-specific conditional use permits) to permit a new facility. That’s a possibility of 51 permits at the least — and you thought you had it bad!
Since 2000, over 2 million tons of aggregate have been used for salmon habitat restoration and preservation.
Washington residents, on average, use 1.3 cubic yards of concrete and 1.25 tons of asphalt per person, per year.
On average, every Washington resident consumes 13.5 tons of aggregate per year in residential and commercial construction.
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