Burning Bio News

The Dearborn-based company’s vehicles are now on average 85 percent recyclable by weight. That means they are made of everything from recycled metal to soy and bio-based seat cushions and seatbacks. Such advances mean more than green bragging rights for big corporations to impress the tree hugging crowd. Ford saved approximately $4.5 million by using recycled materials in 2009.

A grading structure which aims to clarify for the first time what kinds of recovered wood are suitable for different end markets has been published by the Wood Recyclers’ Association (WRA). The four grades are:
Grade A: “Clean” recycled wood - material produced from pallets and secondary manufacture etc and suitable for producing animal bedding and mulches.
Grade B: Industrial feedstock grade - including grade A material plus construction and demolition waste, this is suitable for making panelboard.
Grade C: Fuel grade - this is made from all of the above material plus thatfrom municipal collections and civic amenity sites and can be used for biomass fuel.
Grade D: Hazardous waste - This includes all grades of wood including treated material such as fencing and trackwork and requires disposal at special facilities.

Cellulosic ethanol to end paper recycling. – mj: This is a link to an article written about the threat of biofuels to the recycled paper industry. Things will change. It is too early to tell how much, but the really great news is that we are moving toward an economy where we can not afford to waste biomass/organics anymore. Biomass and waste organics will migrate to the highest value. It may very well be in recycled paper. It might also include energy.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors this week overwhelmingly passed what is likely the country’s most comprehensive recycling and composting ordinance. The Board voted 9-2 to require residents and business owners to sort recyclables, food waste and trash for weekly collection, in an effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions and, ultimately, make the city landfill- and incinerator-free by 2020. The ordinance, which will take effect this fall, provides fines for failure to comply with the recycling/composting regulations.

Williston-based Vermont Organics Reclamation has developed a biomass development business plan that includes redistributing biomass sources with end uses that make economic sense. The futuristic part of their planning would involve the acquisition or extension of rail sidings in a variety of locations around the state, for the placement of collection cars that would then transport recyclable organic materials to a central facility they have begun to put together in St Albans, VT.

ElectraTherm, Inc. (www.electratherm.com), manufacturer of heat to power generators, announced use of the ElectraTherm Green Machine in a significant geothermal application. The ElectraTherm Green Machine can produce power from a wide array of heat sources including industrial waste heat, stationary engines, biomass, and solar thermal installations. Recently interest in geothermal applications has taken center stage. According to a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, if we tapped 40 percent of the geothermal heat under the United States, it would meet demand 56,000 times over. — mj: One of the projects utilizing this technology captures the heat from geothermal brine used to drill for oil. This is a great application, but it kind of messes with one’s mind, ‘greening’ fossil fuel production.

BioCycle celebrated its first 50 years last month in California. It was quite an event! During the entire conference, there was an awareness that while most of us are fledgling pioneers on the bioeconomic frontier, Jerry Goldstein and his family have been out there cutting the wake — clearing the path — for the rest of us. This article is Part I of the first 50 years of the BioCycle story written by Nora Goldstein (Executive Editor).

I write for BioCycle in part because of my huge respect for the mountains they have moved. Even though I am a paid-biomass professional, I learn something each month in BioCycle. This link takes you to the anniversary column I wrote for the April issue. In preparation, I dug a little deeper in the 2002 US Economic Census (the details for the newer 2007 Economic Census are still being prepared). I found the $8.3 billion of products in the $51 billion, waste management service sector. But I also found $83.7 billion in converted paper (recycled) products. In addition to the other recycled product industries, easily over $100 billion in economic growth has come from value-added wastes, that 50 years ago were simply discarded. I have no doubt that BioCycle played a seminal role in making that happen.

In the Coachella Valley, CA, Thomas Azwell and Costco have forged a partnership — with the help of several million worms on a worm farm at the Salton Sea — turning green waste from Costco’s Palm Desert and La Quinta stores into high-grade organic fertilizer. Paper, cardboard, food scraps — anything that was alive at one time, Azwell said — are collected at the stores and then sent to California Bio-Mass, a composting facility in Thermal. The next stop is Salton Sea Farms, also in Thermal, where about 100,000 pounds of red wiggler earthworms chomp through the compost, refining and enriching it with beneficial microbes and bacteria. The resulting fertilizer, called Vermigrow, is now sold at 27 Costcos in California and is being used at organic farms.

Les Puglia, www.yankeepelletmills.com, in Effingham, NH, makes pellet mills. While Yankee Pellet Mills make mills for all size operations, the market I find exciting is the homeowner market. They make a pellet mill for $2,000 that will allow a homeowner to turn their yardwaste, cardboard, and paper into pellets that can be burned in the home pellet furnace. They’ll even train you on pellet making basics.

NatureWorks, US-based producer of bio-based plastics, has recently come to a conclusion that the current automated plastics sorting systems are capable of sorting bio-based plastic bottles from the petroleum-based plastic bottles with a near 100% accuracy. The conclusion comes following company’s detailed 2-year assessment of several plastics sorting equipment manufacturers which have automated systems to segregate bio-based plastics from petro-plastics including PET, HDPE, PVC, and PS.

Marion County, OR has started a curbside used oil program. Starting this month residents can recycle used cooking oil, secured in a clear container with a tight lid, in their red bins. The SeQuential-Pacific Biodiesel plant in Salem will process the oil and within weeks use it to fill fuel tanks around Oregon.

BioCycle Magazine and Columbia University’s Earth Engineering Center have just completed the 16th nationwide survey of the State of Garbage in America. State of Garbage In America provides a picture of how municipal solid waste (MSW) is handled throughout the United States. The 2008 State of Garbage in America survey, conducted over the winter and spring of 2008, collected and reports on calendar year 2006 data provided by individual states (where available). This is THE definitive data set of US MSW and recycling.

Twenty projects throughout California will receive a total of $20 million to improve the collection of recyclables, provide cleaner recyclable material, create new jobs and increase the amount of products with recycled content. The grants are being allocated by the California Department of Conservation, and the money comes from unclaimed California Refund Value charges that consumers pay when purchasing aluminum, glass and plastic drink containers.

Plastic has a high BTU content. The environmental benefits surrounding plastic as a fuel are a bit gray. Releasing fossil carbon from converting plastic to fuel, is not much different than burning fossil fuel for energy. The value of energy can provide the incentive to keep it out of landfills and the environment. This article is a good technology review on plastic to fuel technologies.

The Kern County Fair (Bakersfield, CA) generates about 1.5 million pounds of waste throughout the 12 days of festivities. Everything but the food waste, 84,000. lbs, gets recycled: paper, cardboard, plastic, and manure. That is about 95 percent recovery.

A report issued by PA Gov. Rendell and the Chesapeake Bay Commission, proposes that swithgrass and other energy crops be grown for biofuels on abandoned and reclaimed minelands. A new State law requires that gasoline be blended with at least 10 percent cellulosic ethanol once in-state production of that commodity exceeds 350 million gallons annually.

The National Biodiesel Board has officially cut the ribbon on its new building at 605 Clark Avenue in Jefferson City, MO.

Green homes have multiple definitions. This article out of Lodi, CA, is about the environmental saving from installing synthetic (artificial) grass in residential and public areas to save water and mowing. –mj Plastic and rubber in place of growing plants does not seem intuitively ‘green’ to me, but saving water in an arid climate and not mowing are both very ‘green’ from a resource conservation standpoint. I guess we will just have to keep our minds open…

In February 2008, Popular Science Magazine (PS) produced their list of the top 50 greenest cities in the US. A recent article about one of those cities pulled me to the original list of 50. PS used data from the Census Bureau and National Geographic to screen cities over 100,000 population. They were evaluated on source of electricity, transportation, green living (green buildings), and recycling. On the one hand, it doesn’t fit exactly with carbon credits or some of the other emerging measures of green, but it does acknowledge that significant things are happening in our large cities.