Mar 05 - The Sacramento Bee

Climbing energy prices, shrinking landfills and looming global-warming mandates are spurring several California cities to solicit garbage-to-energy proposals such as one under negotiation for Sacramento.

The technologies range from a super-heating process that turns rubbish into synthetic fuel to fermentation of organic wastes into ethanol.

"The technologies are ready for municipal solid waste disposal," said Fernando Berton, research manager for the state Integrated Waste Management Board.

Interested cities -- including San Jose, Fresno and Los Angeles -- have little verifiable data at hand, however, to support developers' claims that the high-tech disposal methods won't cost more than using landfills, produce toxic emissions or consume more electricity than they generate.

No such conversion plants for municipal solid waste exist in the United States, though some are in various stages of planning in Florida, Louisiana and Michigan. Local officials would have to travel to Japan, Europe or Canada to see such systems for themselves.

"They're asking me to document everything and to visit the facilities in Japan," said William Ludwig, chief executive officer of U.S. Science & Technology, who is negotiating a proposal with Sacramento city officials.

Ludwig's Sacramento-based company and its affiliated team of technical and financial consulting firms have proposed a type of thermal conversion called plasma gasification.

The goal is to reduce the $8 million a year the city pays to haul municipal waste to a dump near Sparks, Nev., and possibly earn revenue. The process recovers heat to make steam for generating electricity that could be sold.

The City Council authorized staff last week to negotiate exclusively with Ludwig's company for up to 90 days before returning with a recommendation.

The company is one of 11 that responded to the city's requests last August regarding "treatment technologies that are well-proven at commercial scale, have high landfill diversion rates, and can generate a wide range of useful by-products that can be marketed for revenue sharing by development partner(s) and the city."

Los Angeles County waste officials also are leaning toward gasification to dispose of some of the 10 million tons of waste now buried annually at Puente Hills Landfill, the nation's largest dump. The landfill is scheduled to close in five years with no plans to replace it.

"We're not going to have any landfills in Los Angeles County," said Coby Skye, associate civil engineer with that county's Department of Public Works. "We'll either ship them to a distant location or convert it locally, produce fuel and energy and avoid all the transportation impacts."

Los Angeles County has a huge financial incentive for installing local waste-conversion plants before Puente Hills closes.

Dumping garbage at its more distant landfills costs $75 to $100 a ton in trucking and dumping costs compared with a tipping fee of $30 a ton at Puente Hills, Skye said. County supervisors are scheduled to vote May 15 on a plan to subsidize and build the plants.

Waste incineration pencils out economically and even meets the environmental standards using the required "best available" pollution controls, said the state's Berton.

Unlike waste-to-energy incinerators, the gasification plants don't actually burn or combust the waste. Instead, the waste disintegrates into vapors and liquids by using temperatures approaching those at the surface of the sun.

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