The decision over the future of Greensboro's trash that is before the city council this spring essentially boils down to three options: Continuing to transport the city’s solid waste down to a landfill in Montgomery County, reopening the White Street Landfill or using an alternative technology called advanced pyrolysis to dispose of the city’s trash at the transfer station on Burnt Poplar Road.
The fiscally conservative majority on council has made no secret of its desire to save taxpayer money by ending the current arrangement. No one disputes that reopening the landfill in northeast Greensboro would save the city money, but staff does not expect to have a direct cost comparison for the various proposals until April 19.
Considering that neither continuing the present arrangement nor reopening the city’s landfill are attractive options and that each potentially involve significant political liabilities increases the likelihood that council will take a close look at the third way when it interviews vendors on Tuesday at 1 p.m.
One company is proposing to use advanced pyrolysis technology — Carolina Energy Development, led by CEO John Rodenbough of Summerfield. Rodenbough says his company could process the city’s municipal solid waste for $40 per ton. Dale Wyrick, the city’s interim environmental services director, says the city’s current cost per ton is $41. Rodenbough says his company might be able to reduce its charge to the city if it were to qualify for a US Department of Energy grant, but there’s no guarantee.
I haven’t had a chance to read all the proposals by the three private vendors that are proposing to reopen the White Street Landfill, but Rodenbough tells me their tipping fees (costs charged to the city) range from $20 to $25 per ton. So the cost savings of using advanced pyrolysis looks pretty minimal compared to reopening the landfill. Yet, considering moral questions that have been raised about putting trash in a predominantly African-American area (White Street) or in a poorer county (Montgomery), council might decide to explore advanced pyrolysis based on slight savings and the principle of handling solid waste in our own community instead of offloading the problem onto someone else.
At the heart of consulting company HDR’s questions for Carolina Energy Development — suggested for council’s consideration during Tuesday’s interview — is scalability.
Carolina Energy Development, which was established last year, would partner with California-based International Environmental Solutions Corp., which is the patent holder of the technology that would be used — called “IES Advanced Pyrolytic System." As background to guide council members’ questions, the city’s consultant notes that the company’s first project is a 40-ton-per-day “commercial pilot system” that went into service in 2005 to “validate and optimize the technology with a variety of waste streams.”
The city’s Request For Proposal states that the city’s garbage trucks collect about 123,200 tons of trash per day. I haven’t been able to get a solid answer to the question of how much waste a private company would need to process per day to handle Greensboro’s trash: If you divide the previous figure by 365, you get 338; Rodenbough says the city has “control” over 637 tons per day. Wyrick says the transfer station handles about 800 tons of waste per day, but it’s not clear that all of that comes from the city’s residential pickup.
The consulting group suggests that council ask Carolina Energy Development: “Can you shed some light on how you expect to scale up the pyrolysis system to three 200-ton-per-day units for Greensboro when your reference projects are much smaller, seem to be using a variety of waste for testing and research, and only one of the projects referenced has any operational data (with the other two just starting)?”
Rodenbough told me scalability plays to the particular strengths of his company’s proposal.
“The systems that were built in Europe for pyrolysis and plasma gasification are for over 2,500 tons per day,” he said. “The advance that IES has made is a modular system that comes in 200-tons-per-day increments. It’s like looking at the first-generation Prius versus the third generation. The Greensboro project would have three units running together. There’s an advantage to that: When you’re doing your maintenance you rotate your units.”
Timing would be a factor. Consultant Joseph L. Reading has told council that Carolina Energy Development would have to secure local and state permitting to operating an advanced pyrolysis facility, and the company has said it would need 18 to 24 months to become fully operational, meaning the city would have to find a temporary solution in the meantime.
Other questions council might raise concern operational viability and air emissions.
International Environmental Solutions Corp. opened a pyrolysis facility as a commercial pilot project at its headquarters in Menifee, Calif., located in Riverside County, in 2005 that was capable of handling 40 tons of waste per day. Company president Karen Bertram told me International Environmental Solutions sold its pyrolysis facility last year to another company under a lease-purchase agreement in which the seller receives a certain percentage of profits each month until the note is paid off.
The pyrolysis unit was sold in January 2010, and the Menifee facility is being dismantled, according to materials submitted in Carolina Energy Development’s proposal. The new ownership plans to operate the relocated facility at 62285 Gene Welmas in Mecca in another part of Riverside County, which happens to be located on the Cabazon Indian reservation, a tribe with a somewhat interesting back story.
Bertram said when the new facility is operational, about 80 percent of its daily input will come from residential sources routed through a transfer station in Indio, with the remainder coming from a tribal-owned tire recycling enterprise. (For geographical reference, the Coachella music festival — the west coast’s equivalent of Bonnaroo — is probably the area’s most renowned event.
Bertram told me that her company decided to sell its pyrolysis unit because the state of California had been under a moratorium for new air permits and that by the time the moratorium was lifted, in January 2010, the company had already unloaded its equipment.
Jeff Gow, a waste management engineer with the Riverside County Public Works Department, characterized the ownership change and relocation somewhat differently, telling me that there had previously been a facility in the county that was “taking trash or refuse. It was a pilot project. It was really small scale. They were doing pyrolysis. They were having some trouble with air emissions; that’s why they had to go to the Indian reservation.”
Gow said that Riverside County, with a current population of about 2 million, is not pursuing pyrolysis as a means of disposing of its solid waste, and suggested the technology isn’t viable yet.
“To my knowledge, there’s not a pyrolysis plant that’s doing something like that now,” he said. “From what I’ve heard, there’s air emissions to take into account environmental concerns. I don’t think it’s ready yet — not until it’s economical to handle the higher tonnages. We’re governed here in southern California by an air quality management district. So far, the air quality management district hasn’t approved any pyrolysis.”
Bertram said Gow’s account of her company’s development is simply not true. She said the only issue the company has had with air emissions concerned a biosolids test conducted under a research permit whose results exceeded the limits for nitrous oxide. No nitrous oxide control was used during the test. As a result, Bertram said the company concluded that processing “100 percent biosolids is not necessarily a good thing,” adding that southern California's standard for nitrous oxide emissions are 50 percent higher than that of the national average.
Bertram said her company was seeking an operating permit when the system was purchased a year ago. Tests had been conducted under research permits.
Bertram said the air quality standards are more stringent at the facility’s original location in Menifee than in Mecca. Because the new location will be on a reservation, she said, the new operators can choose whether to get the site permitted through the federal Environmental Protection Agency or the more stringent South Coast Air Quality Management District, which covers Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange and Los Angeles counties. She said the new site will opt into the federal regulatory system, but will exceed the federal requirements.
“We’re going to be in South Coast standards, but EPA is the agency issuing the permits,” she said. “We’re not taking any shortcuts.”
Bertram said Gow has never visited any of her company’s sites, adding that other local waste management officials in southern California would vouch for the viability and soundness of the technology she’s developed.
She said a better reference would be Coby Skye, a civil engineer with the Los Angeles County Environmental Programs Division. Skye wrote that conversion technologies, which include pyrolysis, “can be used to stretch landfill capacity, reduce greenhouse gases, generate valuable products, renewable electricity and green fuels, and transition to a less polluted, more sustainable world” in a PowerPoint presentation for the Southern California Conversion Technology Project.
Carolina Energy Development’s proposal states that International Environmental Solutions Corp. has been selected by Los Angeles County for a commercial demonstration project, and is developing waste conversion projects in Brazil, Poland and Ireland.
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