Atlanta crushed about 200,000 tons of Georgia Dome concrete after the 2017 demolition; the rubble became the base for three new projects on the same downtown site

Thousands of people lined up on the rooftops, at the parking lots and against the windows of downtown Atlanta hotels on a November morning in 2017 to watch the Georgia Dome fall. The 25-year-old home of the Falcons, two Super Bowls, an Olympics, and a Final Four, blew up at 7:30 a.m. in less than 12 seconds. The building took 30 months to build and was destroyed by a force of about 240 tons of explosives.

The clips circulated across social media, and for many, that was the end of the story. What actually happened to the 200,000-plus tons of broken concrete left behind in that crater is the more interesting part. None of that concrete left the grounds; it was literally the foundation upon which the rest of it was built, according to the Georgia World Congress Center Authority (GECCA) reports.

The afterlife of the Georgia Dome stadium


We may like a good demolition video. But the less romantic part: packing away roughly the weight of some 1,300 blue whales of broken concrete may not be of much interest to us. That's not the second act most of America's demolition debris gets. EPA's study of construction and demolition materials finds that hundreds of millions of tons of this waste are created annually in the United States, and a significant portion is not returned to the supply chain.

The Georgia Dome site didn't take that route. Demolition crews reportedly toppled the rubble into the crater the implosion created and used it as backfill, raising it to about 14 feet, equal to the surrounding grade. That decision was more than just a matter of optics. While there are still practical obstacles in the path of recycled concrete aggregate, including varying codes, lack of awareness, and specifications, a 2007 peer-reviewed study titled “Use of aggregates from recycled construction and demolition waste in concrete,” published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling, showed that reused concrete aggregate can be used with reliability in appropriate applications despite being studied for years for use in lower-tier applications. That is, this wasn't a novelty; it was a well-established engineering technique, applied at an unusually large scale.

Three new things, one old footprint

Now the fun begins for those who have ever tailgated at an NFL game without thinking about what's under the parking lot. The Georgia World Congress Center Authority constructed not only one replacement, but three on the same 20-plus-acre downtown site. The Home Depot Backyard, a 13-acre space just outside Mercedes-Benz Stadium created for tailgating during games and open spaces during other times, was the first to open. The new Orange Deck parking structure was then unveiled, featuring over 600 spaces, opening ahead of Super Bowl LIII in February, 2019. Finally, a 976-room convention hotel, now Signia by Hilton Atlanta, opened in January 2024 to serve the adjoining Georgia World Congress Center. All three stand on top of what is, quite literally, the bones of the old stadium.

The part worth being a little skeptical about

However, at the core of this was a logistics and cost consideration. Trucking 200,000 tons of concrete across metro Atlanta instead would have been slow, expensive, and disruptive to a busy downtown corridor, which is exactly why burying it on-site, rather than hauling it away, was the more practical call from the start. The crushing and dropping were more of an engineering issue than an environmental one. It's not a bad thing to do. It makes for a smarter decision, and a greener one for that matter, which is also a better lesson for cities in the U.S. than a feel-good headline, anyway.

So why is this type of on-site reuse not yet standard on big demolition sites across the country? That is something to ponder. Either way, when you next go to a Falcons game for a pre-game beer in the Home Depot Backyard, you'll be standing on the same concrete that held up a stadium until its 2017 demolition. That's an unusual and strangely satisfying recycling story.