Do you ever wonder where your waste and recycling goes? For residents of Washington’s King County, they received a new facility managed by the county’s Solid Waste Division. The new Factoria Recycling and Transfer station includes a dedicated building for collecting household hazardous waste and offers a variety of recycling services while serving residents and businesses from Bellevue, Issaquah, Mercer Island and the Sammamish areas.  

Early on, King County communicated that all construction needed to be performed while the facility was fully operational seven days a week. In order to achieve this, we developed a four-phased approach and sequenced work to ensure all moving parts would minimize the impact to the facility while scheduling work during off-hours. 

An important hurdle we overcame was to ensure the project minimized disruption to the public and integrated environmentally conscious features. The facility can collect rainwater from roof surfaces and use in its bathrooms and facility wash-down hoses which is projected to save over one million gallons annually in domestic water supply. A misting system was also installed in the roof to provide a deodorizing spray and to mitigate dust, providing an extra protection of health and safety for the operators and public while reducing odors. The project team also installed 50,000 native plants surrounding the facility to aid in its aesthetic.  

We worked closely with the county to demolish three existing structures on-site, construct a new waste and recycle transfer building and a new household hazardous waste building, retrofit work to the existing scales house building, extensive earthwork and underground utility work, as well as 88,000 square-feet of concrete paving and 185,000 square feet of asphalt paving. 

The Factoria Recycling and Transfer Station brings an aesthetically-pleasing facility to King County, allowing residents and businesses a new and improved location to dispose of recycling materials.