What do you do with your trash when it’s the length of several men and is measured in tons?
This is a question the Delaware River Port Authority faced last year during its renovation of PATCO rail over the Ben Franklin Bridge. The $103 million project resulted in more than 400 tons of junked steel, tracks from Camden to Philadelphia.
“It got to be a huge pile,” said John Rink, PATCO’s general manager. “Some of our track workers mentioned selling it for scrap.”
PATCO followed through on the idea, and made some money back. While PATCO has long recycled metal like shavings from wheels that had work done on them, and contractors are able to reach agreements to scrap some of the metal from PATCO projects independent of the agency, 2015 was the first time the agency directly scrapped old rail and other heavy metal objects.