J.H. Findorff and Son, Inc. practices what its client, Epic Systems of Verona, Wis., believes — that green building is an investment. It pays for the customer.

Findorff, headquartered in Madison, Wis., is the general contractor for the new Epic Systems headquarters under construction in Verona. The six-building campus will have 540,000 square feet under roof, and an in-ground parking facility for 1,400 vehicles.

Campus buildings are all concrete post-tension structures with structural steel third floors and roofs. Structural Engineering is provided by Magnusson Klemencic Associates of Seattle.

The Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership of Seattle and The Cuningham Group of Minneapolis are the architects.

Affiliated Engineers, Inc., Madison, provided the mechanical engineering for the electrical, HVAC, plumbing, and geothermal heating and cooling system.

Green building reflects the Epic culture, that recycling is simply the right thing to do as part of being a good neighbor and steward of the land. Only 40 acres of the 338-acre site are disturbed by construction.

Recycling of materials is part of the job.

The Findorff philosophy is that if employees are taught how to recycle construction waste on projects, they'll come to expect recycling on all projects, so Findorff incorporates a recycling plan in the job site setup.

Deana Turner, project manager for Findorff, said that employees recycle at home, and if the resources are provided they'll do it at work.

Implementing the recycling plan starts out as a cost for contractors, but recoups its costs when managed well, said Turner.

Marc "Nibby" Damman, Findorff's safety coordinator agreed that if recycling containers in the right place, construction workers will recycle.

"They want to do it — if you just get them in a situation where they can do it," Damman said.

Construction crews need feedback on recycling efforts.

When Damman does the Tool Box Talk each day in a different building on campus, he talks about Epic, and the materials that workers are recycling. Recycling is something that the customer, Epic, does as a company.

"If something is contaminated — and we've had contamination — we get back out to the guys. We had a wood dumpster with rebar in it. They understand the cost if those things had gone into the wood chipper," said Damman.

The crew gets rewarded for taking the time to recycle on-site.

"We have pizza for lunch, and the WasteCap guys come and talk, and thank the workers personally for putting the stuff in the right dumpster," Damman said.

The quantities of reclaimed or recycled material are significant. Almost 3,000 cubic yards of material have been reclaimed so far, equivalent to 4 feet of fill across three average-sized suburban lots.

"It really got me that we have already recycled 10.44 tons of mixed paper. There is a lot of cardboard and paper in construction. Everything shows up in cardboard boxes and cardboard packing materials," said Luke Hutchins, project engineer.

According to WasteCap Wisconsin, one ton of cardboard is the equivalent of 17 trees.

Wood pallets are re-used.

"Many of our materials come shipped in wood pallets," Turner said. "And some suppliers charge us $12 a pallet, so you don't want it to be waste wood. You want to return the pallet, get the $12 credit and let them re-use it, and save the cost for everybody."

Hutchins said that, to date, 216 tons of wood had been recycled, equivalent to the weight of lumber in about 200 homes.

Through mid-January, 7.5 tons of drywall had been collected, about enough to sheetrock half a dozen homes. But, WasteCap had found a local market, a neighboring farmer, who would use the gypsum on his cropland.

Turner said, "We are piling it on-site, bringing in a grinder, grinding it, and working with a farmer to spread it on his fields. So it's not going into a landfill."

Things don't always go smoothly when a new procedure is put in place.

"Our waste hauler had never dumped drywall on-site before; they had reservations. We asked them to drive it out back, and dump it in a pile for the grinder. They said, 'We can't do that. We are supposed to dump it in our land fill. If you are going to do that, we need to see a DNR permit.'

"We worked with WasteCap to get a DNR permit to recycle the gypsum. It was a little 'out of the box' for our waste hauler, but they did it. We write in our subcontracts that subcontractors have to participate in the recycling program. They don't always know what that means until they get here," Turner said.

Findorff's goal is to recycle whatever is practical.

WasteCap Wisconsin had advised that 50-percent material recycling was practicable. Other contractor's experiences had been that recycling 75 percent of waste material meant spending more money to recycle than recovered cost — they spent more labor hours than the value of recovered material.

Findorff makes it easy for workers to pitch in.

Dumpsters are located along the path where forklifts commonly travel. That makes it easy for forklift operators traveling empty to pick a dumpster and move it to the proper spot for recycling.

The forklift operators know when dumpsters get full, and how often. Operators see that a wood dumpster needs to be emptied two or three times a day, but another will be emptied but once a week.

As work progresses, dumpsters are relocated along new forklift paths, so forklift operators can easily find them.

"It's just about human behavior, and figuring it out," Damman said.

Said Turner, "Dumpsters need signage. We have learned a couple of different things: locate it next to the dumpster, and be specific. We tried magnetic signs on the smaller dumpsters, but if you use them on the big dumpsters and they pull them...sometimes they don't come back. The truck drivers, who are coming to pick up the dumpsters, are not looking for signs."

On the smaller dumpsters that forklift operators are picking up, Findorff put magnetic signs. On the bigger dumpsters, sandwich cards work better. Truck drivers will pull them out of the way, pull out the full dumpster, unload an empty and put the sign back in the spot.

"If you have an operation that is using a lot of wood, you can take the metal sign off, put a "Wood" magnetic sign on it, set it next to the guy who is generating the wood waste and go to town," Hutchins said.

WasteCap is partner in finding a market for the plastic that is not currently recycled: PCV piping. A job has to generate enough to make it worthwhile to haul.

"We will get it, but eventually — at the end of the job. For materials that we are not recycling, we keep working with WasteCap to find a market. For example, the plastic nails buckets were too difficult to recycle so we are reusing them. Our supplier took them back to the shop. All we had to do was ask," Hutchins said.

Epic Systems will begin staged occupancy of their new headquarters this fall, continuing into the summer of 2006.