Green Tech

Municipal trash giant Waste Management on Thursday created a joint venture that will turn waste into energy using technology that it says is cleaner than incinerators.

S4 Energy Solutions is a joint venture which will use plasma gasification technology from InEnTec of Bend, Ore., to build distributed energy systems. Waste Management financed the creation of the venture, marking the first time that the trash collector has invested in gasification technology, said Senior Vice President Joseph Vaillancourt.

The new company plans to build distributed energy systems that use separated industrial waste as a "feedstock." For example, the company plans to design systems that can turn medical waste into electricity at hospitals, said Jeffrey Surma, the president and CEO of S4 Energy Solutions.

There are a number of mostly small companies that are developing trash-to-energy systems around gasification. One company, Enerkem, on Wednesday passed the environmental regulatory process and won approval to build a facility to turn municipal solid trash into ethanol and chemicals in Edmonton, Alberta.

Rather than burn trash, gasification heats the material at very high temperatures until it breaks down and produces a synthesis gas, or syngas. That syngas can be burned in a natural gas turbine, which is considered a relatively clean way to make electricity. S4 Energy Solutions said that it can also make ethanol, other liquid fuels, or potentially hydrogen.

The InEnTec product has a process for cleaning the syngas. Initial tests show that the level of environmental pollutants dioxins and furens released is low, Surma said.

(Credit: InEnTech)

"The emissions from a power generating facility would be far better than EPA requirements, comparable if not better than a power generator operating on natural gas," he said, adding that the company hopes to have customers later this year.

The technology was originally developed in the early 1990s at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Surma said.

S4 Energy's planned gasification systems won't replace incinerators but they do provide an option for on-site energy generation. Waste Management will provide ancillary equipment, such as sorting, to create a full waste-to-energy system, Vaillancourt said.

Rather than stay in the ground, trash from the Three Rivers Landfill in Ponotoc, Miss., will be turned into ethanol.

Montreal-based Enerkem on Thursday announced plans to produce 20 million gallons a year of ethanol from waste at the Mississippi landfill in a project valued at $250 million.

This is some of the equipment used in Enerkem's multistage process for convering waste to fuel.

(Credit: Enerkem)

The "feedstock" for the ethanol will be municipal solid waste, as well as wood residues from forest and agricultural activities, according to Enerkem.

The company's process can sort household trash, diverting material that can be recycled and processing the rest into ethanol, a liquid fuel blended with gasoline.

The project is one of only a few in North America to convert waste products into ethanol or electricity using processes that waste-to-energy companies say is cleaner than existing technologies such as incineration.

After sorting and drying the waste, Enerkem breaks down the material with heat and pressure using a gasifier. The gasifier creates a synthesis gas that is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. That synthesis gas, or syngas, is then converted into ethanol or other chemicals.

The company, which was founded in 2000, has built a few demonstration facilities in Canada using both municipal solid trash and utility poles as a feedstock. At a conference earlier this month, company CEO Vincent Chornet said the technology is largely developed and that Enerkem is now looking to commercialize the process more broadly.

Coskata and BlueFire Ethanol are two other cellulosic-ethanol companies that plan to turn both wood chips and municipal solid waste into ethanol.

BOSTON--To many communities, trash-to-energy means burning garbage. But a handful of companies say they are close to bringing cleaner technology to market for making electricity or ethanol from waste.

At a panel discussion on waste-to-energy at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen East conference here on Tuesday, representatives from four companies detailed their plans to use gasification to convert waste products to usable energy. Some products are ready to be deployed more widely while others are still in the pilot testing phase.

The promise of using municipal solid trash or other waste products for useful energy is tantalizing: it's a renewable resource and reduces the need for methane-emitting landfills or incineration.

But making the technology less expensive, along with resistance from communities over environmental concerns, remain formidable barriers.

"It's a bit of minefield. We all run companies where 40 companies have failed before us," said Bill Davis, the CEO of Ze-Gen, a start-up which has a pilot facility for turning construction debris into electricity.

Workers at Ze-Gen's waste-to-electricity test facility in Bedford, Mass, where construction debris is heated in an oxygen-starved chamber to break the material down into its component elements, including hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

(Credit: Ze-Gen)

Representatives from the four companies--Ze-Gen, IST Energy, Enerkem, and Plasco Energy Group--took pains to point out that gasification is different and cleaner than combustion.

In a gasifier, a feedstock like municipal trash is heated at high temperatures and pressure, which breaks down the material into a synthesis gas, which contains hydrogen and carbon monoxide. That synthesis gas, or syngas, can be burned in a commercial turbine to make electricity or heat.

Plasco Energy Group appeared to be furthest along in terms of commercializing the technology. It has a facility in Ottawa, Canada, that handles 100 tons a day of municipal garbage left over after recyclable items have been removed. The company plans to open a manufacturing facility this summer to produce more of these 100-ton modules and is in discussion with communities in California, British Columbia, France and the U.K., according to CEO Rod Bryden.

Bryden hopes to replicate the model in Ottawa where the waste-to-energy facility is sited in the city and the community holds the company to high environmental standards for air quality and waste water disposal.

After creating a syngas, its equipment can separate residual materials and turn them into products, so that 99 percent of the input is used. Left-over solids, for example, can be mixed to make asphalt or other construction equipment, Bryden said.

"One of the things about garbage (as a feedstock) is that it's where the people are and that's where the energy is used," he said. Wind and solar, by contrast need to have transmissions constructed. "The first barrier to overcome is environmental (such as air quality). If you can't get by that, you won't be able to get into business."

Costs, too
Enerkem uses a gasification process as well, but makes ethanol rather than electricity. Last year it signed a contract with Edmonton in Canada to use municipal trash which will be converted into ethanol. It also has a demonstration plant in Westbury, Canada to use utility poles as a feedstock.

It plans to open a facility in Montreal, which took only four months to be permitted. By contrast, the last incinerator in the U.S. was built in 1996, according to Vincent Chornet, the CEO of Enerkem.

Next week, the company will announce plans for another waste-to-ethanol facility in Mississippi, he said.

Permitting, however, remains a formidable barrier, said Stu Haber, the CEO of IST Energy, which has developed a waste-treatment machine that can fit onto a flatbed truck. It's aimed at hospitals, prisons, and other buildings that generate at least two tons of trash a day.

Regulations for waste-to-energy were not written for gasification technology, which means that state agencies don't know how to deal with IST Energy's product, which the company intends to start manufacturing this summer.

"If we can't (get through) restrictions in government agencies, we'll have to go out business and it will make it harder for the industry," Haber said.

Also, within communities there's opposition from people who associate waste-to-energy with incineration, noted Ze-Gen's Davis.

On a technical level, making sure that a gasification can produce enough energy to be a replacement for fossil fuels, such as natural gas, still remains a challenge. Ze-Gen's business model, for example, is to get a high-quality fuel that can replace natural gas at a power plant facility. But with falling fossil fuel prices, the target is harder.

"Our competitor effectively is landfill most of the time so the biggest long-term issue is economics," said Ze-Gen's Davis.

Updated 9:45 a.m. PT with clarification on Enerkem's different facilities.

When a school or office building thinks about distributed energy, it usually means solar panels propped up on a roof.

A small company called IST Energy has another vision: it's developed a shipping container-size contraption that turns your building's trash into electricity and heat. The company is expected to unveil the unit, called the Green Energy Machine (GEM), on Monday.

The idea behind the GEM is to offset a building's energy use while dramatically cutting trash disposal fees. The cost of trash removal can vary greatly, but a university or office park with a number of buildings could pay about $200,000 a year, according to IST Energy executives.

The company says the GEM is clean technology because it doesn't burn the trash. Instead, the machine uses gasification, a process that overall pollutes less than combustion. A number of clean-tech companies are trying to combine gasification with renewable sources of fuel, namely municipal solid waste or biomass.

A demonstration unit of the Green Energy Machine from IST Energy that converts trash into energy.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

The GEM unit is designed to take up as much space as three parking spaces, making it suitable for office buildings, hospitals, and the like. Metal and glass have no energy content, so they should be recycled. But everything else--food, cardboard, plastics, agricultural wastes--can go in.

"Normally, when we tell people what we're doing, they say, 'You can do that? I had no idea that was possible," said Stu Haber, president and chief executive of IST, which is based in Waltham, Mass.

The company, which was spun out of a research and development firm, says it can convert 95 percent of the waste--up to three tons of trash a day--into usable energy. The remaining 5 percent is ash. With three tons of trash a day, a unit can provide enough electricity and heat for a 200,000 square-foot building holding about 500 people, it says.

So far, a handful of universities, a municipality, and a real-estate developer have come by its Waltham, Mass. offices for demonstrations.

Got a big trash bill?
Haber said the unit pays for itself relatively quickly but realizes that the novelty of the GEM could make it a tough sell. He hopes to sell between 5 and 10 units this year. "The first GEM will be the hardest one to sell," he said. Noise from the machine could also be a barrier.

Corporate purchases of solar panels have been growing rapidly, depending on a state's incentives. Haber argued that many companies invest in solar energy to reduce their carbon footprint in a visible way, but a purchase of a GEM can be driven entirely by money, he argued.

Loading garbage into the demonstration unit of the Green Energy Machine.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

Feeding the maximum of three tons of trash will yield about 120 kilowatts of electricity and about double that in heat, which will fulfill about 15 percent of a building's energy needs, IST Energy figures. The bigger financial benefit is in cutting disposal fees, Haber said.

With an up-front cost of $850,000, a GEM unit will have a payback in three to four years, the company calculates. More likely, those interested will go with a leasing option that would eliminate the hefty up-front investment.

"Everybody loves the fact that they're helping the environment, but because we're talking to businesspeople, I have to assume that they're interested because of the very quick payback," he said.

There's also a 10 percent federal tax credit available for this sort of renewable energy, Haber said.

Squeezing more value from refuse
From the end user's point of view, the GEM is designed to be simple. Through a loader, trash goes into the machine, which shreds the garbage.

Then the machine removes moisture and creates pellets--shaped just like the sawdust pellets used in pellet stoves. Then the pellets are put into an air-fed gasifier designed by the company, which generates what is called a synthetic gas, or producer gas, which typically contains mostly hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

The dark pellets were made from office trash. On the right are sawdust pellets used in pellet stoves.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

That gas is the fuel for making electricity or heat. IST Energy recommends that the best energy source would be a natural-gas microturbine, which would need to have its setting adjusted, or a generator. It takes about two hours before the GEM runs from its own energy output, so the main carbon emissions come from burning the synthetic gas.

Garbage is already used as fuel source in a number of places. Some landfill operators capture methane from degrading trash to make electricity. Trash incinerators, too, can create some usable energy, but they are considered inefficient and polluting.

Looking to reduce shipments of diesel fuel, the U.S. Army last year tested portable trash-powered generators in Iraq, but the project is said to have not met all its goals.

For energy technology firms looking for a cheap source of fuel, trash appears to be attracting more interest.

Another Boston-area company called Ze-Gen is pursuing the same general idea as IST Energy. Last week, it raised a Series B round of $20 million to build a facility to take construction debris and make electricity at a central location using a gasification process.

Another firm, InEnTech in Oregon, is pursuing a different technology process to get the most energy out of household garbage.

Many of these firms have yet to test their products at commercial scale. But at a time when people are seeking clean and renewable-energy sources, waste may come full circle and become a valuable commodity again.

Dave Chameides shows off some of his trash, along with one of the worms that help him keep volume and odors under control. For a photo gallery of Chameides and other trash-tracking bloggers, click on the image.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)

How far would you go to demonstrate your concern for the environment? One California man is so concerned about how much garbage we generate that he's decided to live with it...literally.

"Here's the basement. Um, obviously, all the bottles -- don't hit the top one 'cause it dominoes down, it gets a little ugly," Dave Chameides tells CBS Early Show national correspondent Hattie Kauffman.

Since January, Chameides has saved all of his trash in his basement.

"Pretty much every time someone hears that I'm saving all my garbage in the basement for a year, the first question is 'You're crazy, right?'" Chameides says.

It's an eco-experiment to see how little garbage one person can produce in a year.

"When you look at all these bottles you'd think, 'I'm just not gonna have that beer tonight,'" Kauffman says.

"No, not really, I mean I thought about getting a keg because I thought that would take care of the bottles, but I'm sticking with the beer bottles for now," Chameides says.

From empty boxes to broken bulbs, everything is saved and sorted.

"This is the bag of bags, 10 months," Chameides says.

"Potato chips, soy nuts ...," Kauffman notes.

"Yeah, you name it."

Food scraps go first to his dog, then to the pet rats. Other leftovers are consumed by his worms.

"They eat the paper too. They turn this all into really good fertilizer," Chameides says. "And you cover it up and goodnight."

And because of the worms, the basement doesn't stink.

"I've actually had four months worth of food down here at any given time," Chameides says. "It smells like dirt."

Snubbing the landfill
EPA studies indicate the average American generates about 1,600 pounds of trash per year -- more than half goes to a landfill.

"I don't care where you are politically or environmentally, that's just stupid," Chameides says.

Incredibly, Chameides has piled up just 60 pounds, and he's always looking for ways to reduce. He is a cameraman. When the crew breaks for lunch, he grabs his reusable bowl, passing up paper products. And when he goes shopping ....

"We've all been taught to bring your own bag," Kauffman says.

"Yeah," Chameides says.

"You're saying bring your own container."

"Bring your own container, exactly," Chameides says. "If I bring this, then they don't have to give me the wrapping. I can take it home, marinate it in this."

When his experiment ends on Dec. 31, his trash won't be headed for a dump. His garbage is going on permanent display at the Museum of Trash in Connecticut, inspiring others to talk trash.

"Right now, grab a piece of paper and a pen, write down everything you're going to throw away for the next week and look at it. Fifty percent of it you can get around. So should you keep all your trash in the basement? Well ask my wife about that one," Chameides says with a smile.

Chameides will have a book out next month called 365 Days of Solutions. It'll be filled with all sorts of ways to reduce your garbage. If you're interested in finding out more, you can go to his blog, 365daysoftrash.com.

The junk is made, literally, from junk: 15,000 plastic bottles, a Cessna cockpit, and a used sail.

(Credit: Peter Bennett/Ambient Images Inc.)

Sailing 4,000 miles on the Pacific Ocean made Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal sick. It wasn't waves that turned their stomachs, but the amount of plastic garbage they encountered on a voyage with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation earlier this year.

The activists wanted more people to share their disgust about plastic litter that swirls, relatively unexplored, in continent-size patches of ocean.

To that end, they have built a motor-less craft from 15,000 recycled beverage bottles, fishing nets, and the cockpit of a Cessna, and are sailing it more than 2,000 miles from southern California to Hawaii. They left Long Beach, Calif., on Sunday.

The sailors plan to collect samples from plastic-polluted ocean water, but this mission's main aim is to attract attention.

(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

The 1.5-ton junk features a solar panel and wind turbine to power GPS and other devices. It's made of six pontoons each 30 feet long, filled with 2,000 soda and sports drink bottles, and triple-wrapped in used fishing nets. Twenty sailboat masts provide a frame, secured to a cabin cut from a Cessna 310 fuselage.

On the last Pacific voyage that ended in February, Eriksen and Paschal helped marine researcher Charles Moore assess the extent of pollution in the waters leading up to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic debris some estimate to be as large as the United States.

In early tests, a sample showed 48 parts of plastic to each part of plankton.

"They haven't finished processing the samples, but there was an exponential increase in the plastic," said Anna Cummins, who was also aboard and serves as Algalita's education adviser. "What looked on the surface like clean water, when you pulled it up, it looked like plastic soup. It was disgusting."

Algalita researchers said the floating, soupy landfill isn't well understood because satellites can't spot the translucent particles. And although efforts by scientists to explore plastic in five gyres around the world have been lacking, interest is expanding as the public learns more.

"No one really knows what's out in the other gyres," Cummins said. "In the north Pacific alone there's Capt. Moore with his research boat. We are a small organization with five or six paid staff members."

Eighty percent of the plastic comes not from ships but from land, where tossed consumer goods eventually travel from beaches and rivers into the ocean, according to Algalita.

Plastic concentrates poisons such as PCBs at levels a million times higher than found in the water, according to Japanese researchers.

The amount of plastic produced in the United States has nearly doubled in the past two decades, according to the American Chemistry Council.

"Recycling isn't the solution," Cummins said. "We think there absolutely needs to be a reduction in the overall use and consumption of plastic."

Cummins said she backs the attention-getting adventure but feels nervous about the safety of Paschal and Eriksen, her fiance.

For more than a decade Algalita researchers have been collecting samples from the North Pacific Gyre, which traps untold amounts of plastic particles in its eddies.

(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)

"Yes, we are risking our lives, but the issue of petroleum-based plastic and our national dependence on petroleum, warrant urgent action," noted Eriksen on a blog that will chronicle the journey.

However, he added, the sailboat masts and aluminum airplane fuselage are easy for radar to detect. "We have a better chance of being seen by big ships than typical fiberglass sailboats do."

Two satellite telephones keep the sailors in touch with the rest of the world. They also have several GPS units, VHF radios, and a Coast Guard beacon. Three months' worth of food includes a bucket of Hershey's Kisses.

It's not the first junk journey for Eriksen, who holds a doctorate in science education. After serving as a Marine in the Gulf War, he traveled the Mississippi River in a handmade raft of plastic bottles, then wrote a book about the trip.

The current odyssey is costing between $40,000 to $50,000, with big support from donations, Cummins said. Most of the bottles were given by a Burbank, Calif., recycling center. Patagonia gave the crew 500 Nalgene bottles being phased out due to concerns about bisphenol-A leaching from them.

The crew, towed first to San Nicolas Island before setting sail, encountered gale force winds Tuesday night. They plan to arrive in Hawaii in about six weeks.

The junk, floating on bottles meant to support 6 tons of weight, left Long Beach on Sunday.

(Credit: Peter Bennett/Ambient Images Inc.)