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Monday, Nov. 16, 2009

Atwater company turns old concrete into cash

ATWATER -- At the north end of Castle Airport's air strip, mounds of rubble rise like rough hills above the nearby almond orchards.

The roughly 20,000 tons of stacked concrete and asphalt were offloaded here by construction companies and anyone else needing to rid themselves of demolished concrete.

Refuse for some, it's cash money for others.

The concrete and asphalt here are the property of Jim Brisco Enterprises, which crushes it and then sells it as road base and gravel. It may not look like a typical recycling operation, but pretty much every piece of rock or gravel in the place is bound to be reused.

"If we weren't doing this, a lot of it would have to go to the dump," said Jim Brisco Enterprises's president, George Morrow. "Everything they bring in, we recycle in one way or another," added Dan Hull, one of the company's owners.

Jim Brisco Enterprises -- named after its now retired original owner, Jim Brisco -- is a $2 million concrete and asphalt recycling operation, among other enterprises. It's run by Morrow, his son Chris Morrow and Hull. In total, they employ seven.

Hull and Chris Morrow have been best friends since second grade, said Hull, when they played with toy trucks in the sandbox. "Our toys just got bigger and a hell of a lot more expensive," said Chris Morrow.

Aside from crushing concrete, Brisco enterprises sells concrete and processes bio-solids, or sludge from wastewater treatment plants.

Hull and Chris Morrow learned how to run the crusher and much of the rest of the business when they worked for Jim Brisco.

Then in 2007 the three bought the business. "At that time it looked like a good deal," George recalled.

Business was ramping up then.

During the boom years their crusher was running 1,800 hours a year, said Chris Morrow. But in 2008 much of the building boom came to a halt, and few people wanted their piles of rubble crushed. At the peak of the boom, said George Morrow, they handled 12 to 15 jobs a year.

Now much of the concrete they recycle is from people who bring it to their yard. In fact, the yard saved them, said George Morrow, since there was little other crushing work.

When their $300,000, 103,000-pound crusher is running, its constant hum sounds like the rotors of a Huey helicopter, said Chris Morrow. The huge machine, set on the back of a semi-trailer, can turn massive chunks of concrete into small crushed rock or even sand.

Once it has been crushed, the rock flows along a conveyor belt and is ready to be taken away.

So next time you're driving along a gravel driveway, those rocks crunching below your tires may well have been crushed by Jim Brisco Enterprises.

Reporter Jonah Owen Lamb can be reached at (209) 385-2484 or jlamb@mercedsun-star.com.