WRECKING AND RECYCLING

Frank Provenzano's enviromentally conscious ProGreen Demolition
company will recycle as much material as it can from the old lakeside Molson
brewery it's tearing down to make way for a condominium development.

From a brewerey to beer cans

Destruction to construction

HOW IT'S BUILT
Stephen Weir

It is taking a lot of Molson's muscle to recycle Toronto's landmark lakeside
suds factory.

An environmentally bent demolition company is painstakingly deconstructing the
Fleet St. Molson's Brewerey, turning it into powdered concrete, ingots of steel
and, eventually, aluminum beer cans.

Even as the Molson building is being taken down, there are still parts of it
that tower above the Gardiner Expressway. The shrinking factory is a beacon
for the disappearing industrial district that once employed thousands along
Toronto's eastern waterfront. The beer builing and almost all other factories
and warehouses in the Bathurst and Lake Shore area are being shuttered, shut
down and converted into upscale housing projects.

"This puppy was over-built. There are at least 3,000 metric tons of steel in
there. It was as though they were getting ready for World War Three," says
Frank Provenzano as he points to a growing pile of twisted steel girders.

Provenzano is one of four brothers who own and operate ProGreen Demolition, a
Concord, Ont., company that specializes in recovering recyclable materials from
the buildings it tears down. (The family also owns and operates Anpro
Excavating & Grading Ltd.)

The Molson site is being cleared in two phases to make room for the West Harbour
City condominium developmet, a project dubbed "Toronto's last great downtown
waterfront address."

ProGreen is in the midst of recovering almost 80 per cent of the material in
what once was a city-block-long brewery. The company is saving steel girders,
concrete walls, brick, aluminum window frames and copper piping. Some of the
material is going to recycling companies while the rest will be re-used in the
construction of the large West Harbour City townhouse condo project on the
Fleet St. lot just east of Fort York.

"In the bad old days of the 20th century a demolition team would come with a
tall crane and a wrecking ball," notes Provenzano. "They start at ground level
and quickly reduce a building like this into a mountain of unusable rubble.

"Using our new precision machinery it will take us months to bring this one
down. We start at the top floor and our equipment surgically removes those
parts of the building that we can reuse."

At first glance the heavy equipment that is used to reach out and pull out
strips of aluminium looks prehistoric. The tongs at the end of the articulated
arm of the High Reach "demolition evacuator" machine look and act like the jaws
of a T-Rex. Made of heavy iron, they easily brush, bash and snip their way
through a factory floor seven stories high.

The German-made Liebherr High Reach is a strange-looking piece of heavy
equipment. The engine of this 53,000-kilogram evacuator sits affixed to the
top of tank-like crawlers. There is an articulated cab attached to the base
that tilts up to a 30-degree angle, giving the operator a flexible line of
sight into the demolition zone. The most important part of the High Reach is
the three-part bendable arm that can snake its 4,400 kg iron tongs through a
window and pull out huge pieces of stone and metal.

This new generation of multi-million dollar equipment is not only versatile, but
very clean and quiet, too. The site is beside a new upscale condo project (the
Aquarius) and, to date, the demolition has moved forward without any complaints
about noise or dust.

"The secret to our recycling is our experience in the very strength and
precision of the machinery," says Provenzano. "Once we have taken the
structural steel out of the building, we have a shearing machine (which looks
like a mutant steam shovel with scissors) that snaps the steel into manageable
metre-long pieces."

The steel blocks along with the recovered copper and aluminium, are trucked from
the site to a number of Ontario-based recyclers. Aluminium window frames are
melted down by a firm that, fittingly, will use it to make (among other thigs)
beer cans.

ProGreen does get paid for the scrap, but the real savings for the owners of the
site come from not having to pay to dump the rubble in a landfill site. "We
will divert about 80 per cent of the material that was used in the Molson
building," explains Provenzano, "and the savings to the builder are greater
than if they used a traditional wrecker" which would haul the refuse to a dump.

All of what ProGreen pulls out of the building is reused. The thick concrete
floors and walls are ripped down and then pulverized in an unused corner of the
lot by a number of machines.

The concrete will be processed into coarse white particles, which will be used
in the making of gravel when construction of West Harbour City begins.

ProGreen expects to be finished taking down the first phase of the Molson
building by the end of June. The southeast section of the 11-storey brown
brick building reains intact for now, but will come down when all the condos
are sold. It is now the sales centre and has two model suites on the top floor
facing Lake Ontario.

The destruction of the Molson Brewery and the construction of the West Harbour
City project are being quarterbacked by The Plazacorp/Berkeley Development.
The two companies have already teamed to build more than 3,000 condominiums in
Toronto including University Plaza on University Ave. and Wellington Square in
King West Village.

Construction of the first phase of West Harbour City will begin this summer and
it will probably be a couple of years before the 36-storey limestone-coloured
precast tower and accompanying townhouses are completed.

The complex has more than 100 floor plans ranging from full-size one-bedroom
suites to two full-floor penthouses on the 35th and 36th storeys. Units in
Phase 2 of West Harbour City will fo on sale this summer and range from
$250,000 to more than $1 million.