Green Tech

The trash-powered car may someday see the light of day.

CleanTech Biofuels is developing a multistep process designed to take municipal solid waste from a transfer station and turn out ethanol on the other side.

The company recently purchased the equipment and found a site in Golden, Colo., to test it using trash, as well other agricultural and forest wastes, to make ethanol. On Tuesday, it said that it trying to identify a site near landfills and garbage haulers to construct a commercial plant.

Fuel for your car? Companies are developing technologies to convert municipal solid waste to ethanol.

Within two years, the company expects to move from a proof-of-concept plant to a commercial plant, said Michael Kime, the company's chief operating officer.

"We can literally take a truck with curbside garbage and put it almost exactly as-is into our vessels--we just have to take out the large things like refrigerators," Kime said.

A number of projects have been proposed in the United States and Canada to convert solid waste into ethanol, using different techniques.

BlueFire Ethanol is a cellulosic-ethanol company that uses a proprietary acid hydrolysis process to break down organic wastes. It intends to start construction of a commercial-scale, 3.1 million gallon-per-year facility in Lancaster, Calif., which will be located next to a landfill.

Using gasification and microorganisms, start-up Coskata said it can convert municipal solid trash into ethanol as well. In its first demonstration plant in Pennsylvania, Coskata intends to demonstrate its ethanol system using trash--and separately, wood chips--as a feedstock in less than a year, said Wes Bolsen, the vice president of business development and marketing at Coskata.

"Anything that has carbon in it, we're excited by," he said. "I've been talking to all the waste producers in the U.S." The company's target is to get 100 gallons of ethanol from one dry ton of starting material.

CleanTech Biofuels' technology has already worked on turning paper production waste into ethanol through acid hydrolysis. Wood and paper material is soaked in an acid bath, which converts it into sugars. Through fermentation, the sugars are converted to ethanol.

What the company has added to the mix is a conveyor belt system that acts as a high-tech trash sorter.

The waste is treated with steam and pressure in a vessel that removes a significant amount of the volatile organic compounds, according to the company. Plastics that don't break down are collected for recycling.

Broken-down woody materials, which look like wood chips, are collected as they pass over screens and sent to another vessel that converts it to sugars.

CleanTech Biofuels, a public company, anticipates the need to raise equity to finance construction of plants. It also hopes to get some government loan guarantees, Kime said.

The price is right
The company licensed its core two-phase hydrolysis technology from the University of California at Berkeley. But the basic acid hydrolysis process was developed decades ago.

Now, with the rising price of gasoline and government ethanol mandates, this and technologies such as gasification are being pursued to make ethanol.

A picture of CleanTech Biofuels' vessel used to process waste, a first step to converting garbage to ethanol fuel.

(Credit: CleanTech Biofuels)

But in the liquid fuel industry, the cost of feedstock can make or break a company or project.

The price of corn, which most ethanol in the U.S. is made of today, has shot up on demand over the past two years, as have soybeans for the production of biodiesel.

Estimates are that the U.S. could produce 8 billion gallons of ethanol from waste, according to Coskata's Bolsen. The current level is about 6 million from corn. Producers are expected to meet the U.S. government mandate of 9 billion gallons this year.

If trash-to-ethanol plants get approved, and construction starts this year, it would take until late 2011 before municipal ethanol based on solid waste makes a dent in the ethanol supply, he said.

Kime of CleanTech Biofuels said that, ultimately, companies will begin to focus further on municipal solid waste because hundreds of tons are generated in the United States every year. In addition, it already has a collection and distribution system.

"We ultimately believe there will be lots of solutions, given the price of oil and gas today," Kime said. "When you look at the existing waste stream, the price is right. They actually pay you tipping fees."

The key, as with all experimental energy technologies, is to manufacture the ethanol cost-effectively.

CleanTech Biofuels has made some tweaks to the basic acid hydrolysis technique by using nitric acid, rather than sulfuric acid, which will allow it to use less expensive metals in its equipment. The company will also test an enyzmatic process to create sugars, Kime said.

Waste power
Garbage, as it turns out, isn't just good for making liquid fuels. Right now, energy is already produced at landfills in different ways.

Trash that is incinerated can be used to make electricity, which is considered a relatively dirty process. The methane given off by landfills can also be captured to turn a generator to make electricity.

Some companies are also developing portable equipment for taking wood waste and making electricity and heat through incineration.

In another initiative, a start-up called Ze-Gen is constructing a plant that treats construction debris with high heat and pressure to make syngas that can be burned to make electricity.

Kime said burning waste to make electricity will pollute and cost more than making liquid fuels.

Although there are no competitive uses for trash, as there is for food crops, municipal solid waste is a much less consistent feedstock, which poses challenges.

Bolsen at Coskata said the front-end of its system, which uses gasification, can treat a wide variety of trash, including plastic bottles and tires. It's looking at different ways to recycle glass and metal to remove it from the waste stream.

"I never know what's in a ton of trash. Someone could've put batteries or PVC pipes in there," said Coskata's Bolsen. "It's the inconsistency of the material that makes it harder to deal with. But it makes it a fantastic opportunity while reducing our landfills."

Update: 9:45 am PT: corrected the amount of ethanol Coskata aims to get from a dry ton of feedstock and its pretreatment process.

MENLO PARK, Calif.--It's going to take nearly a decade and a half, but cellulosic ethanol will overtake corn ethanol, according to an enzyme maker.

Cellulosic ethanol, in terms of volume, will surpass corn ethanol production in 2022, Joel Cherry, senior director of bioenergy technology at Novozymes, predicted at the Nordic Green conference taking place here at SRI International. That's 14 years away.

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Cherry has a good vantage point into the subject. Novozymes makes enzymes for companies that hope to take wood chips and other vegetable matter and convert it to fuel. Thus, he's in constant contact with people on the front lines of cellulosic ethanol.

The time is needed mostly to scale up. Ethanol production in the U.S. is around 7 billion gallons a year. Cellulosic ethanol is still in the experimental stage--people make it in labs, but that's about it. Getting to 7 billion alone is going to require building a lot of refineries--and corn continues to grow.

Corn, though, can only grow so much. Cherry speculated that corn ethanol production will max out at 15 billion gallons a year. (The U.S. consumes more than 145 billion gallons of liquid fuel a year at the moment.)

The cost of cellulosic plants also needs to decline. Cellulosic plants cost about $2 to $4 per gallon per year. First-generation conventional ethanol plants can make corn ethanol for around $1.50 a gallon. This is the wholesale price. When all the distribution costs and taxes are added, regular ethanol turns out to be more expensive than gas.

The price of cellulosic ethanol "has to be reduced to make it a viable technology," Cherry said.

Talk about your low-cost feedstocks.

BlueFire Ethanol wants to set up a series of small ethanol refineries at the world's finest landfills. The company will convert organic waste--paper, vegetable scraps, etc.--into fuel and then sell it locally. The business revolves around the idea that the feedstock is worthless. Landfill operators pay about $6 a ton to get rid of their trash. By converting it to ethanol the operators eliminate this cost and can qualify for carbon credits. BlueFire operates the ethanol refinery and then sells the fuel.

The first plant, a 3.6 million gallon a year facility that will grow to 12 million gallons a year, will go up in Lancaster, Calif. Later, the company hopes to open larger facilities in Europe and Southeast Asia.

Unlike some ethanol refiners, BlueFire's process does not rely on cutting-edge science. The company breaks down organic matter in an acid bath to obtain the cellulose, and then converts the sugars into ethanol. Still, producing the ethanol costs about 30 percent to 40 percent less than the cost of producing corn ethanol, said Chief Executive Arnie Klann. The lignin, a tough fiber extracted from plants in the acid process, is used to operate the equipment.

"It is old school because it works," Klann said. "Most of what goes into garbage is green waste."

The process is also less energy intensive, and hence less costly, than using plasma technology to eliminate waste, he asserted. Earlier this year, the company landed $15 million in investment from the Quercus Trust (which has also invested in algae fuel maker LiveFuels) and a grant from the Department of Energy.

Plastic contamination in the world's oceans is worse than previously imagined and no amount of technology can clean it up, according to Charles Moore. The oceanographer returned February 23 from a five-week odyssey in the Pacific Ocean with samples showing 48 parts plastic for every part of plankton.

"We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic," said Moore, who has spent more than a decade investigating Pacific plastic pollution. "There's no evidence it will end in a millennium."

Moore and his crew continue to study samples of plastic 'soup' from deep in the Pacific Ocean.

(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

A plastic "graveyard" double the size of Texas swirls in the Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii. There, his crew had found in the water six parts of plastic for every part plankton, with a fivefold increase in the amount of plastic between 1997 and 2007.

But their latest voyage found the pollution even thicker in the "highway" of ocean leading to the great Garbage Patch, according to Moore, who founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, Calif. Moore said that area comprises 2.5 million square miles.

In the Pacific alone, heavily polluted plastic zones amount to the size of the continent of Africa, Moore estimated.

Bobbing in the waters, especially closer to shore, are leftovers of everyday consumer products: plastic bags, toothbrushes, cigarette lighters, bottles and their caps, toys, and fast food wrappers.

"We found a video camera case that was clean enough that you could put a video camera in it, but it was starting to get covered in barnacles," he said.

Eighty percent of garbage within waterways, most of it plastic, begins its journey on land rather than coming from boats, according to Algalita and the California Coastal Commission.

Toxic plastic kills wildlife, poisons seafood, and could even exacerbate global warming.

Stories abound of the bellies of birds and sea creatures stuffed with colorful plastic caps and wrappers mistaken for food.

On their latest trip, Moore's crew was shocked to find that plastic could be creating new habitats. Hungry gulls are traveling far from home into the ocean to feast upon barnacles and crabs attached to plastic debris.

Although there's no solid data about how much plastic birds and fish are eating, plastic in seafood is likely harmful for people to eat, as are better-understood toxic metals such as mercury. Plastic acts like a sponge for poisons such as PCBs, concentrating them at levels a million times higher than in seawater.

Plastic ingredients are linked with various cancers and reproductive problems. For instance, bisphenol A, found in water bottles, has shown in lab rats to disrupt hormones and is associated with obesity and diabetes.

Some scientists believe that those bobbing bits of polymer in the ocean could contribute to global warming by creating a shaded canopy that makes it harder for plankton to grow.

Pelagic crabs attached to plastic, like this laundry basket pulled from the ocean, attract hungry birds.

(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

The deeper Moore's crew traveled into the Garbage Patch, the harder it became to tell what the plastics used to be. That's because the material breaks down into dusty bits. The plastic "soup" is visible up close but not from the air, making its scale difficult to measure with satellite or aerial imagery, he said.

"Day after day, sitting on the bow of that ship, seeing confetti on the surface of ocean, you really become appalled," Moore said.

He gets e-mails nearly every day from companies proposing plastic cleanup methods for the oceans, but none seem feasible by a long shot, he said.

"They want to have navies trawling the ocean, but the ocean's average depth is 2 miles. First you've got to prove you can sift the Sahara Desert."

And Moore is cautious about plans from start-ups such as Climos, which is seeking to seed the ocean with plankton, because there's no proof the algae they'd grow would be safe.

Because Moore sees no way to eliminate the plastic pollution, he urges consumers to change their habits to keep plastic out of waterways. And he wants plastics that can't be recycled not to be produced in the first place.

He and other activists hope for the government to accelerate research into alternatives, perhaps even subsidizing the makers of bioplastics, while building a better recycling infrastructure.

Only about 3 percent of plastics are recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And of those that are recycled, most appear to be sent abroad because there are relatively few plastics recycling centers in the United States.

Moore is suspicious, however, of new, 'green' plastics that haven't been studied in-depth and whose labels don't show how long they would take to break down in water as opposed to a compost heap.

The Gray Lady may someday arrive at your doorstep inside a "green" plastic bag.

A company that makes delivery bags for The New York Times and other major newspapers has designed a plastic bag to biodegrade within three months.

GP Plastics' PolyGreen bags are made with fossil fuels, as are their traditional polyethylene counterparts.

However, a chemical added during manufacturing enables the plastic to be digested by microorganisms. The bags are supposed to disintegrate within a few months outdoors or three years in a landfill when exposed to oxygen and ultraviolet light, leaving behind little but water, carbon dioxide, organic metals, and salts.

The nontoxic, active ingredient speeding up the degradation includes a metal such as cobalt, according to Willow Ridge Plastics. It makes PDQ-H, an additive that enables PolyGreen's oxo-biodegradable plastic to be eaten by microbes.

GP Plastics each year sells some $100 million in plastics that include sleeves that shield newspapers in soggy weather. Customers include The New York Times, USA Today, the Boston Globe and other newspapers published by Tribune, Gannett, McClatchy, and Newhouse News Service.

Each year U.S. newspapers use 7 billion plastic delivery bags, according to the Dallas-based GP Plastics. When discarded, unfortunately, plastic breaks down into ever-tinier molecules, polluting ecosystems and harming the health of animals and humans.

"If you only saw some of the hate mail we get from people saying, 'Your product is clogging the landfills and waterways,'" said Mike Skinner, GP Plastics' chief financial officer. "Well, we're working as fast as we can on this. I don't think this will be the final answer, but it's a step in the right direction."

When San Francisco last March became the first U.S. city to ban plastic bags in supermarkets, GP Plastics protested. It and other plastics makers promoted bag recycling. However, only about 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled even in that city. The companies got to work building greener bags.

GP Plastics says its new newspaper sleeves cost only a fraction of a penny more than non-biodegradable ones.

Hilex Poly Company in Hartsville, S.C., announced last month that its new HED grocery bags will biodegrade in as little as eight weeks. In Britain, Symphony Environmental Limited's D2W plastic, like that of GP and Hilex, includes an additive to accelerate biodegradation.

Companies including BioBags have made biodegradable, compostable plant-based plastic bags for garbage and yard waste for many years. However, plastic bags made from corn tend to break down too quickly to keep a newspaper dry, if flung into a puddle.

Yet some environmental groups suspect that the rise of bioplastics will only add to pollution and global warming. They frown upon growing genetically modified corn for plastics and worry that, as with harvesting plants for biofuels, food supplies will become scarcer as a result.

And some watchdogs contend that chemical additives designed to make petroleum-based plastics degrade may prove in the long run to harm ecosystems. They are suspicious that the companies don't disclose the exact ingredients in their additives.

"There is no such thing as biodegradable plastics," said Stephanie Barger, executive director of the Earth Resource Foundation in Costa Mesa, Calif., which campaigns against plastic pollution.

"They're still using petroleum, which is the No. 1 cause of global warming. What other kinds of chemicals are they putting in those plastic bags? If they're saying salts and metals, well metals are damaging in high quantities."

Barger would prefer that people tote reusable bags, which are becoming chic in some circles (and nearly ubiquitous in Ireland). And how to keep newspapers dry? She suggests separate mailboxes.

GP Plastics unveiled its biodegradable bags this weekend at the Newspaper Association of America Marketing Conference in Orlando, Fla.

Three of the biggest makers of TVs have formed a company to help manage the wave of electronics waste set to swell with the onset of digital television. Panasonic, Sharp, and Toshiba have launched the Manufacturers Recycling Management Co. in Minnesota.

That state last year enacted a law making vendors responsible for their brands' discarded electronics. MRM contracts with third-party recyclers including CRT Processing and Materials Processing Corporation, which specialize in handling tired monitors and televisions.

Old televisions and monitors are laced with lead, cadmium, and toxic flame retardants, but careful recycling can recover valuable and reusable metals and plastics.

Since September, MRM has collected some 750 tons of TVs, PCs, audio equipment, fax machines, and other gear through events such as Plug-In to eCycling programs managed by the EPA and more than 20 tech vendors and stores.

MRM has recycling agreements with vendors including Hitachi, JVC, Mitsubishi, Philips, and Pioneer. The company, which currently has just one employee, plans to make money through fees from manufacturers seeking help to cope legally with cast-off electronics.

MRM is set to expand within the next year in Connecticut, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, and Washington states, and possibly in other states in coming years.

Some 35 states are mulling individual e-waste recycling laws, to the dismay of much of the electronics industry. The Consumer Electronics Association has campaigned for national laws to replace the state-by-state patchwork of regulations. That group runs the Consumer Electronics Show being held this week in Las Vegas, where news of MRM's launch was announced.

"We do desire a federal program and will continue to work toward that," said Christopher Loncto, a spokesman for Sharp.

New rules in Minnesota, for one, appear to be driving up recycling rates there. At the Mall of America in November, for instance, organizers concerned about the danger of traffic jams canceled an e-waste recycling drive that drew overwhelming crowds.

As big brand names try to manage the growing tide of e-waste, small-time entrepreneurs also hope to profit by giving new life to old gadgets. New Web-based companies such as BuyMyTronics and Second Rotation offer to buy people's old iPods and mobile phones.