Safety First With Industrial Equipment and Supplies

Instructions And Insight To Help You Demolition And Dispose Of A Concrete Slab

20 July 2017

Lucille Palmer

An old and cracked concrete slab in your yard can deter from your home's appearance and prevent you from using the ground for other purposes. When you need to remove your old concrete slab, you can do all or some of the work yourself, depending on your skills, knowledge, and experience. Here are some instructions to help you complete one or more of the tasks yourself.

Demolition

Unless your concrete slab is already broken up from age and weather wear into manageable pieces you can lift and move from the site, you will need to demolition the slab. Concrete can be quite heavy, especially when it is reinforced with rebar, weighing 145 pounds per cubic foot. To demo the concrete you can use a sledgehammer or a jackhammer to help you do the work, or hire the work by a contractor.

If you have the strength to handle and use a sledgehammer, this tool can be used for you to break up a standard concrete patio slab, sidewalk, or driveway. If you want to upgrade to a more powerful tool, you can rent a jackhammer from most tool and equipment rental businesses. Some jackhammers are pneumatic or gas-powered and can weigh a bit more than a sledgehammer does, but you only need to hold the hammer upright and move it around on the concrete slab as you crack it apart. With a sledgehammer, you will need to lift and strike it repeatedly upon the concrete's surface.

Begin breaking the concrete, starting at a corner and working your way into the surface an inch or two at a time. Protect any surrounding surfaces from flying shards of concrete by covering glass windows with plywood and covering shrubbery and other nearby structures with a tarp.

Clean-Up

After you have broken up the concrete, use a bolt cutter to cut any connecting rebar within the concrete. Then, pry up pieces of the concrete with a mattock or pry bar and load them into a wheelbarrow to move into your disposal area. Be sure you wear heavy duty work gloves and lift with your legs and not your back as you heft the concrete chunks into your wheel barrow for disposal.

It can be helpful to rent a compact track loader, such as a skid steer or a Bobcat to help you scoop and clean up the concrete chunks, considering concrete can be quite heavy. Your local equipment and tool rental business can rent this type of heavy work equipment to make your clean-up process easier.

Disposal

After you have cleaned up the demolition site, you will need to have the disposal process of your concrete already set up to remove it from your property. You can call a local dumpster and disposal company ahead of time to rent a portable dumpster. The company will deliver and position the dumpster in your yard for you to fill with the refuse from your project. Most roll-off dumpsters will have a side door on the dumpster, which opens, allowing you to walk into the dumpster with the trash and pile it inside. This is helpful also is you are using a track loader to help with clean-up, as it can drive right into the dumpster and add to the disposal pile.

Then, when the dumpster is full, you can call the disposal company to come and pick up the dumpster. Keep in mind the disposal company will charge you to dispose of your refuse by its weight, and concrete can be quite heavy, so figure for the disposal cost when calculating your budget.

If all you are disposing of is concrete with your demolition and clean-up project, you can check into a local concrete recycling company to pick up and process the concrete. Once they break down the concrete into smaller pieces, they will be able to sell it to a road construction company for a road base material, or a building construction company to use the crushed gravel as filler rubble. Other recycling companies can crush the concrete into gravel to be added to a new concrete mixture of virgin cement, water, and additional gravel aggregate.

Use these tips to help you during your concrete demo, clean-up, and disposal. For more information, visit websites like http://www.tcmdumpsters.com.

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