Greening The Pipeline
In 2012, ESMG began work on the Williams Transco Natural Gas Compressor Station 303 in Roseland, NJ. Williams Transco, a subsidiary of Transcontinental Gas Pipeline Co.,) is a leading gas and oil transportation processing company that supplies 14% of the natural gas consumed in the United States.
This project was part of the Garden State Expansion Project necessary to provide increased reliability of gas distribution along the NJ Coast that was affected by Hurricane Sandy and increase energy supply along the Eastern Seaboard. ESMG was tasked with developing an effective waste materials recovery effort for the entire project site that included two industrial manufacturing sites, a residential property, and shared property access to a fully operating communication tower, electrical substation, switching station and metering facility.
The public profile of the project was elevated due to local concerns over co-locating of super high capacity electric power station next to a natural gas compressor station. The site is located at the junction of vital transportation arteries, a shopping mall, ambulatory center, bordering the Essex County Environmental Center, protected wetlands and the Passaic River. Additional concerns included the remediation of hazardous materials contamination of soil and attached to foundation and structures of industrial buildings, and mold from recent flooding of the residential property.
The Williams Transco project team committed to minimizing environmental impacts of the entire project and to follow best practice standards for sustainability by embracing the US Green Building Council's (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Certification standards. The project required a minimum 50% landfill diversion (recycling) requirement in pursuit of a stated 75% waste recovery goal. ESMG was charged with developing the waste management specifications to achieve USGBC certification goals. This required multiple project contractors to submit disposal and recycling plans for all project waste within their scope of work.
ESMG's role in the project included acting as an active management consulting during all phases of demolition, remediation and construction. Early inclusion into the waste management specification design proved very effective, providing measurable opportunities to significantly improve waste recovery efforts and lower cost.
Additional improvements to the waste management plan included leveraging ESMG’s waste industry resources to remove materials in 100 cubic yard trailers. This vastly accelerated demolition activity and limited traffic onsite which improved site safety and performance. Local roadway congestion at the entrance of the project site was reduced which lowered the budget allocated to traffic control.
Managing the construction waste documentation for this complex project included accounting for over 7,507 tons of material generated from December 2012 to February 2014. The recycling effort far exceeded all landfill diversion expectations achieving a 95.4% final project recovery rate. This level of high performance along with the use of certified material recovery facilities would earn this project two additional credits for the innovative project design within the USGBC’s LEED Rating System.
