Big Savings from Drywall Salvage

Last summer Vermont’s largest general contractor, Pizzagalli Construction Company of Burlington (1994 gross of $245 million), had a problem. They needed to convert an IBM office building they had built a few years earlier into warehouse space for the company, a project that involved removal of roughly 5,500 4’x10’ (1,200 mm x 3,000 mm) sheets of drywall from 11,000 linear feet of wall built using a demountable drywall system. With landfilling costs at $74/ton and each sheet of drywall weighing about 100 pounds (45 kg), Gary Parkinson of Pizzagalli figured there must be a better solution than hauling the stuff to the dump.

He called Bob Lawson, who manages the Vermont Business Materials Exchange, a state-funded program that tries to match industrial waste generators with companies that can use those wastes as raw materials for their own manufacturing. Pizzagalli’s construction schedule didn’t permit them to wait for publication of the next Materials Exchange directory, so Lawson drafted a press release for the