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Will Fortney of RedSpark Website & Digital Marketing displays a piece of rebar at TexRock Aggregate Materials in Austin, Tuesday, April 7, 2026.<\/p>\n
Mikala Compton\/Austin American-Statesman<\/p>\n
The Austin area is in the midst of a\u00a0major construction boom<\/a>. Crews across the city and throughout Central Texas are tearing up roads to make room for bigger roads and knocking down bridges to build bigger bridges.<\/p>\n All that demolition leaves behind tons of concrete, asphalt, limestone and rebar. Where does it go? Instead of heading to a landfill, much of it ends up in a giant pile in East Austin outside Paul Gregory\u2019s office window.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Gregory ownsTexRock Aggregate Materials, a recycling yard about 4 \u00bd miles from Austin\u2019s largest ongoing road construction project \u2014\u00a0a complete rebuild of Interstate 35 through the city<\/a>. For 11 hours a day, six days a week, dump trucks roll in carrying rubble from that project and others in the area.<\/p>\n The company crushes and processes the debris into new materials that are shipped back out to road crews, often to the same job site it came from.<\/p>\n \u201cEssentially, I-35 will be demolished, brought here, crushed, brought back to the job site, and made into a new highway,\u201d Gregory said in an interview.<\/p>\n Standing on aggregate materials, founder Paul Gregory discusses the process of concrete recycling at TexRock Aggregate Materials in Austin, Tuesday, April 7, 2026.<\/p>\n Mikala Compton\/Austin American-Statesman<\/p>\n Each day, TexRock receives about 1,500 tons of concrete from demolition work around town. The material is dumped into a big pile, then fed into a series of machines that pull out the rebar and crush the concrete into smaller pieces. Once small enough, the pieces fall through\u00a0 screens and are sorted by size. Rebar is sold for scrap, while the crushed concrete is moved into separate piles to be sold. Asphalt and limestone go through a similar process.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cWe’re not just making big rocks into little rocks,\u201d Gregory said. \u201cIt has to have a certain gradation of fine, middle-sized and large-sized rock, and it has to have low clay content.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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