A pile of shingles diverted from the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency's landfill north of Marion and destined for asphalt pavement (Brian Ray/ SourceMedia Group News).

CEDAR RAPIDS — Odds have increased significantly here that the shingles that roofers tear off your roof will end up in the asphalt of a state highway project and not in the metro area’s landfill.

This month, the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency opened up a shingle recycling operation at its landfill at County Home Road and Highway 13 just north of Marion where it is working in concert with a Marion roofing company to keep asphalt shingles out of the landfill and get them into road asphalt.

The agency is not leading the shingle recycling effort, but joining an effort that has been under way elsewhere in the United States and has been emerging in Iowa the last few years.

Jeremy Bleeker — owner of what he says is the state’s largest roofing company, Eastern Iowa Construction in Marion — has been one of the state’s shingle-recycling pioneers and is now joining forces with the Solid Waste Agency to, as he puts it, get to the future faster.

That future could include the elimination of asphalt shingles from the landfill altogether.

Joe Horaney, communications director for the Solid Waste Agency, says the agency hopes to divert 6,000 tons of shingles from the 190,000 tons of solid waste that the agency expects to bury in the landfill in the next year.

Bleeker, who had recycled shingles for use in dust control on rural roads for several years before he turned to asphalt pavement, says his data shows the agency will be able to turn 10,000 tons of recycled shingles in a year into asphalt.

In the first 10 days of November, the landfill already had diverted 500 tons of shingles, Horaney reports.

Horaney says the Solid Waste Agency’s interest is the same as Bleeker’s: to do the right thing while extending the life of the landfill and turning a waste product into something useful.

Eastern Iowa Construction’s spinoff, RAS Suppliers LLC, is among just a handful of entities approved by the Iowa Department of Transportation to recycle shingles for asphalt paving, and RAS has been working at the idea for a couple of years.

The recycled shingles here most likely will end up at LL Pelling LLC, the area’s major asphalt firm with =asphalt plants in Cedar Rapids, Marion and Iowa City.

Chuck Finnegan, president of LL Pelling in North Liberty, says Pelling has been incorporating ground-up, recycled asphalt shingles into its road asphalt mix in the last year or so as part of a trial overseen by the Iowa Department of Transportation.

Finnegan reports that newly laid asphalt on Highway 13 between Highway 30 and Mount Vernon Road and on state road projects in Anamosa and at Oxford Junction have incorporated recycled asphalt shingles into the asphalt mix.

The climbing cost of petroleum, one of the ingredients in asphalt, is driving asphalt makers like Pelling to line up to get their hands on recycled asphalt shingles, Finnegan says.

He says a typical asphalt mix might include 6 percent petroleum in a mix with aggregates like rock and sand, with petroleum costing $500 a ton and rock and sand, $12 a ton. By adding ground-up, sandlike asphalt shingles into the brew, the mix can use the petroleum in the shingles to reduce the need for new petroleum to 4.8 percent of the asphalt mix. The cost savings is well worth it and the resulting asphalt pavement is no worse for it, Finnegan says.

“The end result is what matters,” he says. “You’re shooting for a perfect cake. You know what you want your carrot cake to look like and taste like, and it doesn’t matter what you add as long as you come out with the end result.”

Roger Boulet, a materials engineer in the Iowa Department of Transportation’s district office in Cedar Rapids, says other states have permitted the use of ground-up asphalt shingles in pavement for quite awhile, though in some instances the shingles have come from excess material from shingle manufacturing plants as much as shingles torn off roofs.

Boulet says the DOT began looking at allowing asphalt shingles torn off roofs in road asphalt in the last two or three years after a demand for the recycled shingles emerged along with entities willing to grind up the shingles to an approved standard.

Bleeker’s Eastern Iowa Construction as well as the Metro Waste Authority in Des Moines and the Waste Commission of Scott County were approved by the DOT in 2010 to provide recycled material as part of a DOT trial. The DOT now is looking to end the trial period and allow recycled shingles to be included as an option in paving specifications for state projects, Boulet says.

Under the new arrangement at the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency’s landfill, contractors will pay $30 a ton to recycle shingles rather than $38 a ton to bury them in the landfill. However, the contractors must separate the shingles from metal, wood, plastic and paper before a load of shingles is accepted in the diversion program.

Bleeker owns the half-a-million-dollar grinding machinery — which removes all the nails and grinds the shingles into tiny pieces — and provides employees to monitor the loads, grind up the shingles and market them to the asphalt plant.

The Solid Waste Agency’s Horaney says the agency is receiving $13 of the $30-a-ton fee for shingles to cover its administrative expenses while the Marion company gets $17 of the fee. Bleeker says asphalt plants now are paying about $20 a ton for the recycled shingles.

The Metro Solid Waste Agency in Des Moines reports it is now charging contractors $10 a ton for shingles rather than the agency’s $34.80 a ton fee to bury them in the landfill, while the Waste Commission of Scott County is charging $15 a ton rather than its normal $25 tipping fee for construction debris.

Eastern Iowa Constructions’ Bleeker says he has spent a great deal of money in the last seven or eight years trying to figure out a better way to do something with used shingles than paying the Solid Waste Agency $120,000 a year to bury them in its landfill.

“I’ve been kind of spinning my wheels, but I did see the future,” Bleeker says.

Joining forces with the Solid Waste Agency should mean that most of the shingles coming to the agency’s landfill from area roofing contractors eventually should get diverted into asphalt pavement. In the process, Bleeker says he might now make a little profit while he adds employees to handle the recycling operation.

“Nothing works without a little passion,” says Bleeker. “Seven or eight years without showing a profit: That takes some passion.”