Brandon Bugge and his wife, Kelly, are shocked by the notion that anyone would consider them environmentalists.
“I definitely don’t want to be called an environmentalist,” Brandon said. “I started out my life in the logging industry.”
A native of Columbia Falls, Kelly grew up in a family that worked in wood products: “We all still live in houses made of wood,” she said.
Yet the two readily acknowledge their young business, Bugge’s Construction CleanUp & Recycling, is – by any standard – among the greenest in the Flathead, if not Montana. The Bugges clean the construction sites of new homes, remodels, renovations, demolitions and even haul off waste from foreclosed homes and abandoned rental properties.
But instead of taking the material to a landfill, they recycle, resell or donate nearly everything: from antiques to cabinets to scrap metal to wooden pallets. Their service saves the contractor money by costing less than the fees to dump the leftover material at a landfill, and Bugge’s Construction CleanUp (BCC) boosts builders’ “green” credentials by reducing the amount of waste their jobs produce.
A corollary benefit of their work is that the landfill sees less trash. In 2009, the Bugges say they recycled nearly 83 tons of material, a slight increase over each of the previous two years. That tonnage equals thousands of dollars in landfill fees saved by contractors.
“It’s very green; we’re very conscientious about it,” Brandon said. “We’re trying to be sustainable.”
The Bugges’ business demonstrates how labels like “environmental” or “green” may be ill equipped to accurately describe the economy of the 21st century. Kelly knowledgably talks about the implications of the United States signing onto international agreements limiting carbon emissions. But Kelly, Brandon and their third partner, Ray Downing, are motivated as much by pragmatism, thrift and the growing market they have indentified as they are by any environmental ethic – yet the end result is the same.
Two years ago, they cleaned out the 120-year-old barn of an elderly West Valley woman preparing to move to a senior community. It took BCC a month, but by the time they had recycled the wood and metals, removed materials that could be resold and hauled the rest to a landfill, they ended up clearing a profit and giving $400 to the woman for having her property cleaned.
Before starting BCC, the Bugges lived in Oregon, where Brandon ran a wood chipper, worked construction and drove trucks. But through his jobs, particularly demolitions, he saw how much usable material gets hauled to landfills. He also learned which kinds of scrap metals, wood and plastics could be resold or recycled, and what truly was junk. His work in the woods taught him what could be turned into pulp or biomass fuel.
“Growing up in Oregon, there’s a lot more recycling than there is here,” he said.
So when they decided to move to the Flathead in 2005, they began researching what it would take to launch a business harvesting recyclable materials from construction sites. There were stops and starts, like when they learned BCC wasn’t required to pay for certain costly permits if they simply had their clients leave the leftover materials in a pile, instead of dropping them in a box. Eventually, though, it began to come together.
“We almost kind of hit the market early here for this type of business,” Brandon said. “It’s the distances to get the recyclables to markets, that’s a lot of what we’ve tackled since starting this business.”
They’ve accomplished that mainly through researching alternate uses for materials that could lead to local markets. For example, Brandon is interested in finding alternate uses for ground gypsum, the main material in drywall. Upon contacting a soil scientist, he learned gardeners commonly use gypsum to strengthen weak soil. So Kelly called local nurseries.
“They said, ‘Yeah, we’d love a local supplier, we’re shipping it in from out of state,’” Kelly recalled.
Then they advised the Bugges on how to package it. Now, he hopes to be able to sell the gypsum he strips from construction sites to local nurseries – exploiting a market where drywall currently ends up in the dump and nurseries pay more for non-recycled gypsum trucked in from elsewhere.
They also donate reusable items they “soft strip” from properties like appliances, or sinks or toilets to charities like Habitat for Humanity. They’ve given laminate flooring to the Spay and Neuter Task Force for their cat room, and old tackle and rods to local programs that teach kids to fish.
Of course, the construction downturn has had an effect on the Bugges’ business. Fewer homes are being built, making for less work in that area. They also closed a store selling recycled material last year because the overhead had grown too high. Metal prices have plummeted. But they have responded to the economy the way any business would, by diversifying the materials they can resell, as well as expanding their services to include snow removal.
But Brandon and Kelly believe BCC is poised to grow as builders find cost savings in recycling anything and everything they can. Eventually, they envision running their own facility where 90 percent of what they take in is diverted to other uses or reprocessed, leaving just 10 percent heading to the landfill.
“Waste is not one of those things we (as a society) put a lot of thought into,” Brandon said. “It’s time to repair and re-fix things and reuse things and not keep buying and wasting.”
For more info, call BCC at 406-253-4836.