Ford’s $3 billion BlueOval battery park in Marshall, Mich., faced many of the challenges that many mega-projects face: suppliers sending prefabricated assemblies ready for installation, but with lots of boxes and pallets carrying the material; an army of subcontractors installing the sets and trying to separate the wood, plastic, and other byproducts of procurement; and a place with trucks constantly coming and going where limiting container shipping would help efficiency. General contractor Walbridge had something the average hyperscaler doesn’t: Woodchuck.ai.
Woodchuck’s AI platform is being used across the Marshall Project site to track, report and validate the diversion of wood, cardboard, plastic and metal, with the aim of limiting labor and integrating the process of removing storage, bins and boxes into Walbridge’s existing workflows. Walbridge saw improvements during the first quarter that diverted thousands of tons of these materials, reducing reliance on both waste and landfills.
Above all, using the AI-enabled platform reduced project costs. While the AI analyzes the site and materials for the most efficient and sustainable disposal and recycling, the general construction processes that have always been used are also put under the microscope.
“Jobs can get really congested with too many trucks, which creates too much dust,” says Woodchuck CEO Todd Thomas. “The more trucks you have, the more risk there is of an accident. By reducing the number of trucks, it really simplifies the job site a lot, which improves safety and of course reduces the [contractor’s] cost
“We don’t transport materials off-site in 40m containers, which is the traditional way,” adds Thomas. “You have a dump truck that comes 10 to 20 times a day to take out 40-foot containers. Instead, we consolidate that material. So we take all the wood, all the pallets and chip it into wood chips and take it out in an oversize semi truck load.”
Much of the packaging for the EV battery pack would arrive on massive skids and require a lot of breaking down, Thomas said.
The amount of traffic saved on the ring roads allowed Walbridge to devote more artisanal workers to the project rather than transporting what was primarily shipping materials in containers, a technology of the 1930s.
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“You can carry roughly one and a half to three tonnes of wood pallets and packing material in a standard 40 meter container, whereas you can take 25 to 30 tonnes in a semi – the maths is pretty simple,” says Ross Linton, Group Vice President at Walbridge, noting the significant reduction in the amount of truck traffic required on site.
Other materials, such as plastics and scrap metal, are being removed from the Marshall BlueOval site in a similar way with the goal of a more organized and sustainable site with better waste outcomes. Thomas said Walbridge crews and Woodchuck staff pack cardboard and plastic on site into 1,000-pound bales and similarly load them into a semi. Woodchuck’s AI system, with cameras, helps pre-order and divert materials for retrieval and ensure it never gets mixed up in the first place. A typical site delivery might involve 80-foot skids reinforced with metal angle iron, Linton said.
“We get the wood, we get the plastic, we get the cardboard, and the AI system can help us identify if someone is putting the wrong thing in the wrong bin,” says Thomas.
Walbridge’s sustainability leaders on the Linton team regularly work with the Woodchuck team to make sure everything is on track. Large magnets on the bins tell the workforce (in English, Spanish and via images) what material Walbridge wants in those bins. Once workers know they are expected to separate materials, Walbridge says they get good compliance.
Knowledge about recycling
One idea that came out of the project is how to better package skids and palletized assemblies. Thomas said analysis of the different plastics used in the different skids showed that clear plastic and white plastic were highly recyclable and have good commodity value once placed in 1,000-pound bales. “There was also plastic that had fiber in it. It was more like a canvas material, and that has a much lower recyclable value,” he says. Not only was it important to recycle the materials, but so was getting someone to pay for the value of their merchandise. Linton and Thomas said they plan to use what they’ve learned at the BlueOval battery park in future projects.
Linton said using Woodchuck on the job came at a later stage of this initial project, but he sees more efficiency in using the system from the start of a project and working with suppliers to ship the right types of boxes and skids to optimize site efficiency.
“This was, in many ways, a beta test, but now that we’ve learned so much through this journey, we’ve had several lessons learned, meetings and conversations between my team and Todd’s team about how we can do it differently, better and more efficiently, in a job where we knew we were going to do it right away,” he says. “Absolutely, there’s a lot more efficiency and recommendations on how things are packaged, to make it better.”
In the case of wood cut in situ and hauled in semis, it was converted into biomass. Biomass partner North Star Clean Energy used the 8,000 tons of pallet wood, skids and other materials to produce clean, renewable energy that supports homes and businesses across Michigan.
In total, the Walbridge team says it was able to achieve approximately 40% of the projected material savings and is making progress on the BlueOval battery farm project, which is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
