SWACO, others exploring how to make cash off trash

A plant to be built next to the Franklin County landfill will
divert polystyrene waste and turn it into building panels.

 

Courtesy SWACO

When coal-burning power plants install smokestack scrubbers to remove pollutants before they're released into the air, white gunk builds up on the filters.

For American Electric Power Company Inc., sending that gunk to a landfill could cost $5 to $6 per ton, adding up to $3 million a year in costs to the already expensive proposition of pollution control.

But that gunk is calcium sulfate, better known as gypsum. After a quick rinse and dry, AEP can sell it to drywall makers and avoid the disposal costs, said Thomas Webb, the Columbus utility's director of land environment and remediation services.

If similar practices spread statewide, turning one company's rubbish into another's raw material could boost revenue while helping Ohio kick its landfill addiction, said Mike Long, executive director of the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio, which operates Franklin County's landfill.

"There is a sincere interest," Long said. "We can actually make these kinds of partnerships happen."

About 60 representatives from businesses, government and academia gathered April 12 at Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. headquarters in Marysville to hear Webb and others extol the value of waste-to-profit collaborations, and then brainstorm on what Ohio should do next.

Long and Joseph Fiksel, co-director of the Center for Resilience in Ohio State University's engineering school, put the meeting together. They expected a small group that would focus on Central Ohio but encountered a larger turnout.

"What I clearly heard was we need to think bigger than Central Ohio," Long said.

A food web for waste

What's also clear is the status quo won't work, the two said.

Ohio produces 20 million tons of waste a year and imports 3.5 million tons from other states, Fiksel said. Franklin County's landfill will fill up and close in 25 to 28 years if current habits continue, Long said. Once that happens, the cost to dispose of trash can be expected to skyrocket.

The key is to start thinking of waste as a product that can be sold, said Andrew Mangan, executive director of the U.S. Business Council for Sustainable Development. Slag from a steel mill, worth about $8 a ton when used as road bed fill, suddenly shoots up to $70 a ton when seen as an essential ingredient to a cement plant.

"We can't afford to throw all this stuff away. We've got to figure out how to make use of it," Mangan said.

Reducing landfill use brings additional benefits to businesses and the environment, Mangan said. The steel-cement partnership first employed at a Dallas steel mill can increase production 5 percent to 15 percent while reducing carbon dioxide emissions 10 percent and nitrogen oxide emissions, a contributor to acid rain, by 25 percent to 45 percent.

Benefits multiply as more businesses enter the partnerships, Mangan said, like a food web for waste. In Kansas City, Mo., he said, 20 businesses are in a network that turns waste into energy or products. Several partnerships dot the country, with a concentration of them in the Great Lakes region. Ohio has potential to start its own, he said.

It can take about a year to get started, he said, requiring backers to collect data on available waste products, analyze whether it's profitable to turn them into something else, and overcome legal and regulatory barriers.

Getting started

Some Ohio companies have forged partnerships already. AEP this year built a conveyor system from its Mitchell Plant near Moundsville, W.Va., across a state highway to CertainTeed Gypsum, which expects to use the rinsed-and-dried gypsum to make drywall by this summer. The plant also will take product from AEP's Cardinal Plant in Brilliant.

The technology can spread as more plants add the smokestack scrubbers, Webb said.

AEP has made about $32 million yearly from selling byproducts or avoiding disposal costs, Webb said, such as by selling scrap metal or the ash left from burning coal. The company also can use one highly alkaline coal byproduct to neutralize the acid runoff from coal mines, he said.

One of the chief ingredients in Scotts' organic fertilizer is chicken manure, which it buys from Salisbury, Md.-based chicken giant Perdue Farms Inc. - removing disposal costs from its poultry farms and reducing runoff of phosphorous to the Chesapeake Bay, according to Scotts.

In Columbus, Rastra Technologies Inc. plans to break ground this summer on a $5.5 million plant near the Franklin County landfill that would turn about five tractor-trailer loads daily of polystyrene waste from industry into lightweight building panels mixed with concrete.

Power will come from a plant to be built by Kurtz Brothers Inc. of Independence that turns food and organic wastes into energy in the form of carbon dioxide and methane gas.

The meeting in Marysville turned up other possibilities. No one's yet ready to divulge details, Long said, but "there were a couple of folks that probably hadn't met before that were thinking, drawing on the backs of napkins."

Overcoming obstacles

State agencies and the Association of Ohio Recyclers have tried to foster such partnerships through Ohio's Material Exchange, a Web site that acts as a monster.com for trash, with companies listing what waste they have and what materials they need.

"It's been fairly widely used, but not nearly widely enough," said Ron Smith, environmental specialist in the pollution prevention office of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

Such sites are helpful for smaller businesses, but larger companies worry about liability and trade secrets when considering a trade over the Web, Mangan said.

Directly brokered deals also face barriers, he said. The most ironic barrier is a federal law to manage waste flow, which can block many partnerships that would reduce waste. Once a material is classified as hazardous waste, a company can be restricted from selling it even if it could be transformed into a beneficial product, Mangan said.

"It's very rigid," he said. "It doesn't allow for innovation."

In some cases, Long said, the technology doesn't exist, such as an integrated system that can sort garbage to separate metals from paper and organic waste that can be digested into usable methane and carbon dioxide. Among other barriers that Mangan listed are perception - such as erasing memories of Columbus' expensive yet failed trash-burning power plant - and simply overcoming old habits.

Smith said he couldn't help but feel his Office of Compliance Assistance and Pollution Prevention is misnamed.

"If we were 'Product Maximization' all along, we'd get a lot more phone calls," he said. "These are not waste. These are assets that belong to your company.