Chuck Taylor & John Znorowski - Featured Employees February 2004

When rehabilitating the old concrete portion of Tropic Street from just west of the Florida East Coast Railroad right-of-way to Park Avenue, the crack and seat method was tried. A heavy piece of equipment was used to crack the existing concrete pavement into small pieces to be used as a base course as claimed by the contractor. Unfortunately, the equipment could not break the existing concrete into small pieces and the force of the equipment damaged existing water and sewer lines under the pavement necessitating costly repairs. The crack and seat method was abandoned which resulted in the Streets Maintenance Division having to remove all of the existing concrete and pavement and hauling in new limerock base material to fill the void left by removal of the concrete.

Concrete that is removed is routinely disposed of in the Brevard County landfill which is costly. Rather than haul the concrete to the landfill, Chuck and John had the concrete stockpiled. They did some research and found the firm of "Crush-It" which had equipment that had the capability to crush sections of concrete into re-usable base course material. The entire stockpile of 6,682 tons of concrete was able to be crushed to be recycled as base rock.

Now when concrete streets are to be repaved under the City's Repaving Program, the existing concrete will be removed and replaced with the crushed concrete. The concrete removed will in turn be crushed to provide base material for additional concrete roads to be reconstructed.

Purchasing new limerock base material for the Street Resurfacing Program costs $6.75 per ton. The trucking costs to haul the material to the jobsite are $5 per ton. To dispose of the old concrete at the landfill would cost $10 per ton. All total, the cost to remove and replace the concrete pavement (not counting labor and materials for City operations) would be $21.75 per ton. Presently, the cost to crush the concrete is $3.90 per ton or $17.85 per ton less. So far, there is a $119,274 cost savings to the City on 6,682 tons of concrete that have been crushed. There are many more concrete roads in the City to be rehabilitated and the cost savings on recycling the old concrete as crushed aggregate to be reused in the reconstruction of the road will no doubt exceed $1 million.

Thanks to Chuck Taylor and John Znorowski, the City will realize a phenomenal cost savings and will be able to reconstruct many miles of concrete streets for much less money than by using the concrete removal, disposal, and new base material replacement method. In consideration, they are very deserving of the honor by saving the City hundreds of thousands of dollars in implementing a valuable cost reduction method.