Salt Lake mall rubble to rise again

City Creek project will recycle half of materials

Published: Sunday, April 15, 2007 12:13 a.m. MDT
 |  E-MAIL | PRINT | FONT + - 
The replacement of Crossroads Plaza and ZCMI Center malls with City Creek Center isn't all out with the old, in with the new.

As The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' construction contractors tear down the downtown malls to make way for the 20-acre retail-office-residential complex, more than half of what comes down will be reused, either in City Creek or somewhere else.

"The idea is to divert away from the landfill as much as we possibly can, because the landfill is obviously a finite resource, and this effort is geared toward a more sustainable development," said Grant Thomas, director of construction services for Property Reserve Inc., the church's real-estate arm. "It takes more time and more care to do this, but it's the right thing to do."

The demolition work will knock down most of the buildings on the two blocks between South Temple and 100 South from West Temple to State Street — leaving more than 200,000 tons of concrete, marble, steel, drywall and other materials on each block.

About 55 percent of that material will find new life: Concrete, marble, stone and other masonry will be ground down and used as road base and fill material at other construction sites, and steel frames will be sold as scrap metal.

Story continues below

Only a handful of materials won't be reusable, including drywall and insulation.

The sorting process is mostly done by machine, and it depends on the building being demolished.

"It's really quite something to watch these operators," Thomas said. "The operators are pretty talented."

For some buildings, it's possible to tear down recyclable materials separately from non-recyclables, so the rubble ends up in already sorted piles. With other buildings, workers will have to manually sort through piles and pull out the recyclables.

The recycling will make the project costlier than if all rubble were hauled away to the dump, Thomas said. But officials have no estimates as to how much more it will cost "because we didn't really approach it from the other side."

The church always planned to recycle its waste, so that's how costs were predicted. A City Creek spokesman previously told the Deseret Morning News that the added cost for demolishing and recycling at the Inn at Temple Square was about 15 percent.

Some of the historic material pulled from the Crossroads and ZCMI blocks also will be reused.

The historic facade of the original ZCMI store currently fronts Macy's, and the sandstone and wood Amussen building — the only remaining commercial building in Salt Lake that was built before the railroad came to the city — is now the base of the Key Bank building. The Amussen building, constructed in 1868, was designed by William Folsom, who was also the architect for the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Both facades will be put into storage during City Creek construction and will become part of the new development.

Comments

You can be the first to comment on this story.

Image
Laura Seitz, Deseret Morning News

Also scheduled to be saved are the 12 wood columns from the Tiffin Room in the ZCMI Center that came from the original ZCMI store.

previousnext

Latest comments

Didn't Obama and Biden just admit to the fact that the stimilus programs were...

The last part of the article about Cowherd is classic!!! I normally like the...

This man was my teacher in high school. He is my friend, he was like a father...

I like millsap, but portland just burried themselves. They made themselves...

It's amazing how quickly society is willing to vaccinate it's children with...

The first income tax was introduced during the Civil War, that's only 70...

If he really did what the evidence seems to show, I don't think he should be...

Utah needs Portland too much. It's much harder than you think to find good...

Restaurant destroyed by fire

stacy, have you ever eaten there ??

I had Brother Pratt at Viewmont High School my sophomore year... I was really...

Advertisements