Sustainable Crushing

So my husband and I were fixing up my friend’s front yard, a gopher-​riddled dirt patch that would otherwise have washed away during El Nino. She is on a budget, which is to say, she has zero money. Likewise, we are on the wrong side of middle class. Her front garden, as is common in her car-​choked neighborhood, had to do double duty as parking. (Actually, the double-​duty part isn’t that common – most of the landscape design involves a trio of older Buicks displayed on oil-​stained concrete and accented with a half-​dead potted jade plant.) We were planning to use urbanite (lah-​di-​dah for broken concrete) to make what we hoped would look like a rock garden while serving inconspicuously as a parking pad.
Anyway, we needed some base rock and sand, so we called the only game in town: Broadmoor. Broadmoor is not in the business of catering to the broke. So I turned to Ron Conway at Sustainable Crushing (the part of Recology that recycles concrete into, fortuitously, base rock and a sand substitute of crushed concrete). I was the first residential customer he’d ever had – and, as it turned out, the perfect test of his commitment to customer service. I had to postpone three times over the course of a month and then, with only eight hours’ notice, move the delivery up a day. Ron was unfazed. When it turned out, inevitably, that I had miscalculated the base rock order, he delivered a third load and helped shovel it until he was sure that we had the correct amount.
The base rock and the sand substitute are both made of recycled concrete, which is just like stone – totally inert. The sand substitute works just as well for plants as actual sand, just maybe makes the soil a little sweeter (less acid). It’s considerably cheaper than Broadmoor, is just as healthy, and makes it possible for the financially challenged to create a permeable hardscape (Ron has plenty of free urbanite at the pier – nice four-​inch-​thick former sidewalks). Plus, it’s environmentally sensible. I totally recommend Sustainable Crushing.