For anyone watching Nashville’s massive east side redevelopment this year—namely the new Tennessee Titans stadium—there’s a question: Where is all that construction debris going? It’s not just an occupational hazard for those in the business to ponder; a national Fox Sports broadcast in September had the exclusive look inside the $2.1-billion domed venue that’s now 75% complete and mentioned the impact.
The part that might surprise the professional and casual observer alike is that what was once considered waste is now treated as a resource. The way this redevelopment area, which also includes a major entertainment zone and tech hub, is managed could reshape the construction industry nationally.
At the center of that shift is Rockwood Sustainable Solutions, a Lebanon, Tennessee-based construction, demolition and recycling company that has moved beyond traditional hauling and disposal to a new model focused on material recovery, end-market creation and infrastructure-level sustainability.
Rockwood’s president and owner Lincoln Young was recently appointed by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to the state’s Recycling Market Development and Diversion Advisory Council. Young plans to bring his long-time perspective to the industry at large.
“It’s about smart materials management that not only benefits contractors and facility owners,” he said, “but the local community.”
While large-scale sorting facilities have helped push recycling rates from single digits to roughly 50% in the state, Rockwood’s recent projects have achieved material recovery rates of 98%. That means almost no waste from the recovery of nine different types of plastics, wood, cardboard, metal rebar, drywall, concrete, roof shingles and more that would otherwise languish in a landfill.
“Most of the industry starts with the question, ‘How do we move this waste?’” Young said. “We start with, ‘What can this material become?’ We build the system backwards from there.”
This “backwards” approach is fueling a boom in a sector that didn’t even exist before. Today, C&D recycling in Nashville is no longer just about hauling; it is about sophisticated material recovery that is reshaping the city’s environmental footprint.
From Roofing to Recycling
Rockwood’s role in construction was born of community necessity. After two major hail storms hit Tennessee, Young saw companies come in from out-of-state to fix roofs—with no waste plan.
“They were taking cash, then packing up and leaving,” says Young, who has a background in roofing. “The community was sitting with 50,000 tons of waste on the ground.”
They went from doing no recycling to taking in the waste to create recycled asphalt shingles and pavement, and building a bustling asphalt plant later sold to Vulcan Materials Co.
“If you’re driving on Tennessee roads, chances are they’ve got shingles in them, and that’s because of Rockwood,” Young says. “There are farms using gypsum in their corn crop, and that recycled gypsum is because we created the end markets for it.”
The backbone of today’s C&D boom is similar; a need to shift toward advanced processing and upstream materials separation to expedite recovery.
This isn’t just about better conveyor belts. Rockwood invents new end markets for materials that were previously destined for landfills, such as wood, plastics, drywall and, the start of it all, shingles. That includes clean energy fuels, harkening back to their original mandate when they started as a public-private partnership with the city of Lebanon to provide clean power to wastewater treatment plants through new technology.
Regulatory Mandates, Corporate Initiatives
The surge in C&D recycling in Nashville today is driven by a fundamental change in how the city and major developers view waste. Nashville’s “Zero Waste” initiative, a 10-year plan to drastically reduce landfill dependency, has introduced new guidelines for material management during the permitting process.
While these are currently guidelines and not mandates, the private sector is moving faster than the law. Large-scale projects, particularly those led by national developers moving from markets like California, are arriving with their own high-intensity requirements.
“We are getting people moving their headquarters. They’re looking at city skylines and asking, ‘Why would we contribute to an overall waste problem when we can harvest these materials?’” says Young, adding that proposal requests are asking for targeted recycling rates that meet LEED standards.
Rockwood partners with commercial contractors to handle specialized waste, LEED management and jobsite recycling documentation, and is a member of the National Waste & Recycling Association.
High-recovery recyclers are becoming another community necessity rather than a construction industry niche.
Economic and Practical Drivers
Beyond the “green” headlines, the boom is underpinned by economics. As landfills reach capacity and tip fees rise, the cost of disposal is becoming a significant line item for contractors. For Young, the realization is practical, dating back to his roofing business.
“What we were trying to do was reduce our cost of landfill and our drive time,” he says of his company’s early days.
Rockwood has expanded its processing capabilities with the acquisition of a dedicated offsite sorting warehouse to further help contractors today. The newly acquired offsite warehouse allows Rockwood to operate as a comprehensive, one-stop shop for a variety of operations, from construction to industrial, that want to meet mandates without having to invest in cost-prohibitive onsite sorting infrastructure of their own.
They take in a diverse array of materials, including ferrous and non-ferrous metals that most customers wouldn’t have enough volume of to fill their own trailer for resale. This mitigates the two largest cost inflation drivers for local manufacturers: facility labor and transportation logistics.
“If we, as a state, want to achieve 98% recycling, then we need small- and mid-size businesses to get on board,” Young said, “and they need partners who have solutions.”
By processing materials locally and turning them into products like mulch or animal bedding, the industry is effectively shortening the supply chain. The result is a “circular economy” where the debris from a demolished warehouse in Nashville might end up as the sub-base for a new road nearby. Construction debris accounts for 30% of global waste, but it won’t always.
“This isn’t about recycling more,” Young says. “It’s about building a system where waste doesn’t exist.”
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