The Sun Valley Recycling Park is a newly constructed facility comprised of two primary operations spanning over 70 acres (on separate areas of the site) both owned and operated by Waste Management, Inc. The first operation is the Green Waste Operation which is permitted to accept up to 2,100 tons per day of incoming green and wood waste that are received and de-contaminated before being ground into multi-purpose mulch for various agricultural uses across Southern California. The second operation is the Transfer Station/Material Recovery Facility that handles the processing of commingled recyclables and (organics-rich) municipal solid waste at a rate of up to 5,000 tons per day before being transferred offsite to markets and /or end users on dedicated recycling routes.

The specifying of hot-dip galvanizing was an absolute must for the steel on this project because it is located 25 miles northeast of the Pacific Ocean exposing the building’s steel substructure to daily exacerbated levels of salty, sea air and environmental oxidation. All of the carbon steel structural framing was custom designed using hot-dip galvanized (tapered) fabricated beam girders supported by very long structural beam columns with intricate tube steel framing throughout both facilities. 

Due to the sheer size and weight of the material only a few pieces at a time could be hung securely on each dip rack and a very large molten zinc kettle was required to process each rack efficiency through the hot-dip galvanizing plant. In the end, 883 tons of carbon steel would be hot-dip galvanized over a 10-month timeframe with multiple loads per week being delivered to the jobsite, ensuring all construction schedule deadlines were met.

The entire project was brought online and put into full operation this year and we are extremely proud to have played an integral part in the construction of this environmentally conscious, civically-minded recycling park - servicing the community for many decades thanks to (in-part) to the superior corrosion protection properties of hot-dip galvanizing.