In August 2009, Nashville International Airport (BNA) shut down runway 2L-20R to undergo reconstruction. A 2007 evaluation of the 35-year-old pavement indicated accelerated deterioration resulting from an alkali-silica reaction. The pavement was cracking and showing structural deficiencies; within five years, the evaluation concluded, the runway would fall below minimal service levels. "The pavement had come to the end of its useful life, which mandated a full-depth reconstruction," reports BNA's Construction Director Christine Vitt. The owner was under a tight time constraint because this was the major runway on a very busy airport.

In order to lessen the impact on the airport and its users, it was decided to build the project all together rather than in two parts. This allowed for Harper to help value engineer some changes to create a consistent product the entire length of the project. The owner had originally designed the project to have two different sub-bases and Harper came up with a plan to redesign the sub-base to be all econocrete, which not only saved money, but also time. This is also the first project Harper paved 37.5 foot lanes 17" thick. In order to pave in this manner it required Harper to run multiple batch plants. Jim Thomas, Harper's Vice President of Operations, describes the setup. "We brought in two batch plants for the north end where we started. When the north end was nearly finished, we moved one of the batch plants over to the south end, and then brought in another one for the south end. We had to leave one on the north end because we had a little more work to complete. Running two batch plants at a time, we had a couple of 6,000 cubic-yard days."

In order to save money and to "Go Green", Harper and its sub-contractors mobilized and began breaking the existing concrete using guillotine breaker/rubblizer. Once the concrete was rubblized small enough to transport it was taken to the on-site crusher to be crushed and screened to the appropriate size, have the reinforcing steel removed and the crushed concrete was then pugmilled to the appropriate moisture content to be reused as the base material for the runway. Utilizing the concrete in this way not only saved the project almost $2 million, it also created a green way to re-use 90,000 tons of concrete. All of the reinforcing steel was then transported to a recycling facility once removed from the broken concrete.