Concrete Recycling vs Landfill: Real Cost for Contractors

TL;DR: For an East Tennessee contractor, recycling vs landfill is simple math. The Blount County Landfill charges about $60 a ton for concrete. At SMSG's Maryville yard, clean concrete drops free. You also skip the scale line, keep a drop-off ticket for LEED diversion, and send the material back into service as aggregate. Use the tear-out calculator to price your job.

There was a time when the county landfill was the only realistic option for a demolished slab. That's not true anymore in East Tennessee. For contractors, the switch is worth understanding because it changes the disposal line on every bid.

Looking for the cost by truck size, pickup through tri-axle? That table lives in concrete disposal cost in East TN by truck size. This post is the contractor side: line-item job costs, annual numbers, and what each option actually is.

The Cost Gap Is the Headline

Everything else is a bonus. The cost gap is why contractors switch.

Landfill and public options, 2026:

• Blount County Landfill: about $60 per ton for concrete. Weekdays only, roughly 7 AM to 3 PM. Out-of-county haulers can be turned away.
• Knox County convenience centers and the Knoxville Transfer Station: refuse concrete entirely.
• Private C&D landfills (Riverside and others): charged by the ton. Call them for current rates.

Recycling at SMSG Maryville:

• Clean concrete, with or without rebar: free
• Asphalt, brick, block, natural stone: free when clean
• No scale, no appointment for clean loads, any county welcome
• Drop-off ticket for every load

Our economics are different from a landfill's. We sell the finished product. The landfill just buries it.

Side by Side: One 25-Ton Job

Say you're tearing out an old commercial parking area and have 25 tons of clean broken concrete. Here's how the two routes compare line by line. Fuel and crew time are estimates for a typical run.

Line Item	Landfill Route	SMSG Route
Tipping (25 tons)	$1,500 at about $60/ton	$0 for a clean load
Fuel, round trip	~$60-$80	~$60-$80
Crew time waiting	~1 hour at the scale	15-20 minutes, no scale
Hours risk	Weekdays, closes ~3 PM	Mon-Fri 7-5, Sat 8-noon
Paperwork	Scale ticket	Drop-off ticket
Disposal total	About $1,670	Fuel and a short stop

The tipping line is the one that always moves in your favor. On a residential or light commercial rebuild, $1,500 is often the difference between a winning bid and a losing one.

The Annual Picture

Nobody does one job a year. Here's what tipping looks like over 12 months at about $60 per ton.

Contractor Profile	Annual Tonnage	Landfill Tipping	SMSG (clean loads)
3 trips/month, 15 tons each	540 tons	$32,400	$0
5 tandem loads/month, ~22 tons each	1,320 tons	$79,200	$0
3 tandem loads/week, 50 weeks, ~22 tons each	3,300 tons	$198,000	$0

That money buys equipment, funds a crew bonus, or goes straight to the bottom line.

Hidden Landfill Costs

The per-ton rate is the sticker price. The real cost of a landfill trip includes:

• Minimum charges on small loads, even if you're only dumping a few hundred pounds.
• Surcharges that move with fuel and operating costs, and extra fees on contaminated loads.
• Wait time. Weigh in, dump, weigh out. Your crew and truck idle in line on your dime.
• Hours. Miss the weekday window and the load rides back to the yard.
• Residency checks. Get turned away as an out-of-county hauler and you've burned a round trip.
• Rising fees. Landfill airspace keeps shrinking and tipping fees have trended up for years.

Why Free Beats Per-Ton for Bidding

Per-ton disposal is a guessing game on a bid. You don't know exactly how many tons come off a slab until it's broken. Thickness varies, rebar adds weight, old work weighs differently than new. So you either pad the number and lose bids, or eat the overage when the loads come in heavy.

With clean loads dropping free, the disposal line on a clean tear-out becomes haul time only. No tonnage guessing.

What the Two Options Actually Offer

A landfill and a recycling yard aren't the same product at different prices. They're different services.

At the landfill

• Accepts almost any C&D waste (concrete, wood, drywall, insulation, roofing).
• Charges per ton.
• Buries the material. No downstream product.
• Diversion counts as zero for LEED and green rating systems.

At a concrete and asphalt recycling yard

• Accepts clean concrete, asphalt, brick, block, and stone. Trash, wood, and drywall get turned away.
• At SMSG, clean loads are free.
• Crushes and screens the material into recycled aggregate.
• Sells RCA back into construction as base, sub-base, and drainage stone.
• Every load counts toward diversion.

The trade-off: a recycling yard can't take your mixed C&D dumpster. You separate the concrete on site. For most demo crews the load is already staged that way. If a job throws off mixed debris, a few minutes of sorting pays: clean concrete comes to us free, and only the true waste goes to the landfill.

Why Landfills Still Take Concrete at All

Landfills sell one thing: airspace. Concrete is a poor material to bury from their side because it's dense, inert, and permanent. Some Tennessee counties have added inert-waste surcharges to push concrete toward recycling. Others keep it competitive because they need the tonnage.

Either way, the landfill's incentives don't line up with yours. Ours do. We want the tonnage because we sell what comes out the other end.

The Material Loop

The landfill takes your concrete, weighs it, and buries it. We crush it, screen it, and put it back in the yard as recycled concrete aggregate. See what is RCA for how the process works.

That means:

• Dump and load in one trip. Drop your tear-out and pick up RCA crusher run or RCA #57 for the rebuild. See aggregate for sale and call for pricing.
• Delivery when you need it. We offer trucking for aggregate deliveries. Call for pricing.
• Rebar gets recycled too. We pull it and send it to metal recycling.

Sustainability That Holds Up

Emissions avoided. A ton of quarried stone requires drilling, blasting, multiple crushing stages, screening, and a truck haul. Roughly 4 to 7 kg of CO2 per ton of aggregate, depending on quarry distance. Local recycling cuts most of that.

Quarry footprint avoided. Every ton of RCA in a driveway base is a ton the quarry doesn't pull out of the ground.

Landfill airspace preserved. Diverted concrete is back in service, usually within weeks, instead of sitting in a cell forever.

Fewer truck miles. Local recycling means shorter hauls than long trips to distant quarries.

The LEED Angle

For projects pursuing LEED, concrete recycling helps on two fronts:

Construction and Demolition Waste Management. Concrete is usually the heaviest stream on a demo job, so diverting it moves your diversion percentage more than anything else. Keep the drop-off ticket from every load in the project records. Since we don't run a scale, check what documentation your LEED reviewer wants and ask us at the gate if you need load details listed.

Recycled Content. RCA used as base under a new slab or pavement counts toward recycled content on the rebuild side.

More in using recycled aggregate for LEED points.

What SMSG Accepts and Rejects

Free when clean:

• Broken slabs, sidewalks, driveways
• Foundation walls, footings, curb and gutter
• Concrete with embedded rebar or wire mesh
• Asphalt chunks, millings, broken pavement
• Brick, block, natural stone and rock

Call ahead first:

• Clean fill dirt

Not accepted:

• Loads mixed with wood, drywall, insulation, roofing, tile, or trash
• Concrete contaminated with fuel, oil, or hazardous coatings
• Concrete with a lot of dirt or clay mixed in
• Anything with asbestos
• Household waste

If you're not sure, call (865) 999-0857 before loading. We'd rather talk it through than turn a truck around at the gate. The full list is on what we accept.

Drive Time Math

If the landfill is closer, is the gap still worth it? Run a tandem dump load of about 22 tons. Say the landfill is a 30-minute round trip and SMSG is a 60-minute round trip. That's 30 extra minutes and maybe 20 extra miles, call it $30 in fuel and driver time.

• Landfill: about $1,320 in tipping, plus scale wait.
• SMSG: $0 tipping, plus about $30 in extra drive.

On a pickup it can be close. On anything bigger, the tipping gap swamps the drive.

Where the Yard Is

245 Brookdale Rd, Maryville, about 8 minutes off US-129 in Alcoa. Most Blount County jobs are 5 to 20 minutes out. Knox County jobs in Knoxville, Farragut, and Karns come in via I-140 or Alcoa Highway, typically 25 to 40 minutes. Sevier County jobs in Sevierville and Pigeon Forge run 45 to 60 minutes.

Compared to the Blount County Landfill, we're closer for most Alcoa and Rockford jobs, about even for downtown Maryville and Louisville, and slightly farther for Friendsville. For Knox County crews, the public options don't take concrete at all.

Example: 15-Ton Driveway in Alcoa

A contractor tears out a residential driveway pad in Alcoa. About 15 tons of clean broken concrete with rebar and wire mesh.

• Landfill route: 15 tons x about $60 = $900 in tipping, plus scale time, weekday hours only.
• SMSG route: $0 in tipping. No scale, no appointment, open Saturday morning.

Run your own job through the tear-out calculator. Pricing the rebuild base too? Use the gravel calculator or the materials page.

What a Contractor Account Changes

If you bring more than a few loads a year, a contractor account smooths things out: faster gate flow, consolidated invoicing on the aggregate and trucking side, and terms once approved. See the contractor account setup guide or contact us.

What Contractors Get Wrong

"The landfill is closer, so it's cheaper." Sometimes on drive time, almost never on total cost once tipping is in.

"Recycling only takes small loads." We take full tri-axles and end dumps all day. Big loads are easier for us than small ones.

"You'll charge me for rebar." No. Concrete with rebar is a clean load and drops free.

"Recycling adds project time." It doesn't. Load-out is identical. The truck just drives to a different address.

When the Landfill Still Makes Sense

Sometimes it does.

• Truly mixed C&D loads. Drywall, wood, tile, and concrete together go to a landfill or mixed-waste facility.
• Contaminated concrete. Oil-soaked shop floors or concrete from a suspected environmental site need the proper hazardous-material path.
• Extreme distance on a tiny load. If you're 90 minutes away with a half-full pickup and the local landfill is 15 minutes out, the drive can win.

Mixed load and not sure? Call (865) 999-0857 before you haul. For everything else, which is most East Tennessee concrete tear-out, recycling is the answer.

Related Reading

• Concrete disposal cost in East TN by truck size: the full pickup-to-tri-axle cost table and Knoxville options.
• Blount County Landfill vs SMSG: what each accepts and charges.
• Using recycled aggregate for LEED points: the LEED submission piece.

Yard is at 245 Brookdale Rd, Maryville, TN. Mon-Fri 7 AM to 5 PM, Sat 8 AM to noon. Details on the free concrete drop-off page or call (865) 999-0857.