Malone discusses project with MidHudsonNews.com

WAWAYANDA – The head of the family-owned Brookfield company said they plan to spend between $15 million and $18 million to build their state-of-the-art recycling center off Dolsontown Road in Wawayanda.

Tom Malone said they are in early design stages, are working through the environmental issues and town approvals process.

Brookfield has operated another facility in Elmsford for 40 years and he told MidHudsonNews.com that they plan to recycle end of life materials – mostly automobiles, but to include other items – and those will help reduce the carbon footprint of the environment.

“If you produce a steel I-beam from mined ore, you start from scratch, you dig in the ground, you get the material out of the ground to make that I-beam, versus taking recycled steel, the energy saving is tremendous,” he said. “If you take an item like aluminum, if you take an aluminum window frame, if you use mined material versus recycled material, the energy savings is 95 plus percent.”

The 48 acre site is the same location where Calpine Corp. had proposed building a gas fired electric generating plant. Malone said they plan on using on 17 acres of the property for their business and landscape the road frontage to camouflage the recycling operations.

He said he expected to address local concerns about truck traffic, noise and pollution as the design work progresses.