Renewable Energy from Waste has been an exciting magazine to work on. Since introducing the publication, it’s website and the Renewable Energy from Waste Conference, we have been drawn more deeply into the waste management business.

Along this journey we’ve learned that the $80 billion waste management and environmental services business, a huge and vital industry, has a gap. Professionals working in the waste and environmental sectors have been missing a dedicated business magazine.

It also has become clear how interconnected the creation of energy and resources from waste is with long-term waste management planning and strategy.

These realizations—combined with being asked time and again in recent years, “Why don’t you guys do a magazine to serve the entire waste industry?”—has lead us to the decision to expand Renewable Energy from Waste magazine, changing its name to Waste Today and expanding our coverage.

Waste Today will focus on thoughtful coverage of the industry, delivering essential business insights for day-to-day operations as well as long-term solid waste planning. Its circulation will deliver blanket coverage of the industry.

Our editorial team has been working around the industry for decades. Through our work on Recycling Today and Construction & Demolition Recycling magazines we’ve developed vast, first-hand knowledge of the business.

We will not walk away from our coverage of conversion technologies. We’ll continue to report on the evolution of the tech as well as currently operating facilities.

However, with the largest, most experienced editorial team in the industry—a combined 100 years of reporting experience—we will focus on delivering comprehensive industry coverage. That includes timely industry news, but goes far beyond that to include deep industry analysis.

We’ll offer the print magazine six times in 2017 along with a dedicated website, WasteTodayMagazine.com, and a weekly e-newsletter.

We’re excited about this important change, and hope that you are, too.

Let us know how we are doing and if there are subjects you’d like to see us cover.

FWD:Energy receives research subsidy from Department of Energy

FWD:Energy Inc., Zanesville, Ohio, has been awarded a research subsidy of $250,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for use at federal laboratories to advance its technology to turn scrap tires into a key ingredient for lithium-ion batteries called Green Battery Carbon.

The awarded funds are provided through the DOE’s Small Business Vouchers Pilot (SBV), a recently introduced initiative of the department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy that helps small U.S. companies bring their innovations to market by pairing them with participating DOE national labs.

FWD:Energy has already developed a system to turn large volumes of North America’s 300 million annual scrap tires into valuable commodity products. The company’s industrial microwave process, called VersaWave, breaks down the scrap tires into synthetic gas, crude oil and reclaimed carbon black, branded FWD:black, for use in rubber products to reduce wear and as the blackening agent in inks and dyes.

FWD:Energy will use its $250,000 Small Business Voucher award for work with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory to optimize the characteristics of its Green Battery Carbon.

Targeted uses for Green Battery Carbon include the anodes of lithium-ion batteries that power mobile devices, power tools and, increasingly, electric cars. In larger formats, the material may be used in energy applications at solar and wind-generation sites.

FWD:Energy’s first commercial plant is slated to open in southeast Ohio. FWD Energy partnered with TechGROWTH Ohio early on to fund research and development, patent filings and facility siting initiatives.

New facility practices could enhance bottom ash recovery

The benefit of two new and innovative practices in managing ash from waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities has been documented in a recent report issued by the Solid Waste Association of North America’s (SWANA) Applied Research Foundation (ARF).

These two new practices include enhanced recovery of a greater range of metals smaller than 0.47 inches from WTE bottom ash and the permitted reuse of bottom ash in road construction.

The ARF report studied the implementation of one approach by the Lancaster County (Pennsylvania) Solid Waste Management Authority (LCSWMA). The authority signed a 10-year contract with Inashco North America Inc., Annapolis, Maryland, to use an Advanced Dry Recovery system to supplement existing in-line metal recovery systems. The system is expected to increase LCSWMA’s metals recovery from ash by 46 percent, including greater recovery of ferrous, nonferrous and precious metals.

Pasco County, Florida, changed its ash management approach to mix only enough bottom ash with fly ash to render the mixture non-hazardous. This new approach frees up 83 percent of the bottom ash to be reused as construction aggregates. The Pasco County Solid Waste Recovery Facility received the first permit issued by a state government authorizing the use of WTE bottom ash as an aggregate in road construction.

Clarkson University professor selected as scholar-in-resident on Montreal research project

Stefan J. Grimberg, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Clarkson University, Potsdam, New York, has been selected as a scholar-in-residence at McGill University’s Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design (TISED), Montreal, where he will collaborate with faculty in bioresource engineering, civil engineering and electrical and computer engineering, as well as faculty of the School of Urban Planning, on a project to divert organic waste from landfills.

Grimberg commuted Montreal during the fall semester and using his sabbatical to work full time during the spring semester.

“My research focus area is biological processes. I’m interested in wastewater treatment processes and the generation of renewable energy through the anaerobic digestion of waste,” he says. “For ten years, we’ve studied high-strength, or concentrated wastes, such as manure to generate biogas.”

Grimberg and his colleagues in Canada will determine the best process to manage the organic waste and recover its energy. Their research will encompass the environmental, economic and policy implications of diverting organic waste from landfills to wastewater treatment plants.

Grimberg’s research group at Clarkson has been operating a food digester system on campus for four years that treats most of the University’s preconsumer food waste.

Richard Szarkowski, a native of Poland, started Dallas Recycling, Dallas, in 1994 with fellow Poland native Roman Krawieczynski after receiving political asylum in the U.S. under the Ronald Regan presidency.

The facility housed an old corrugated cardboard (OCC) company operated by Corrugated Services, headquartered in Forney, Texas, which still buys OCC from Szarkowski and Krawieczynski today.

“We started really, really rough,” Szarkowski says. “There was just the two of us in the beginning, and we started sorting trash in a really small place.” The facility started out as a 900-square-foot building with one old baler, one Bobcat with a forklift attachment and rented equipment.

Szarkowski says he and Krawieczynski worked 16 to 18 hours a day seven days per week in the beginning due to the small space, limited resources and language barriers.

“But our hard work final started paying off,” he says. “We got more accounts, and we hired a sales person. In the beginning, we started with residential reloaders, so we went from warehouse to warehouse, bringing back paper products and old cardboard that we baled and recycled.”

In 1998, Szarkowski exchanged his reloaders for the company’s first roll-off trailer and fuel cans. Now, the company offers 14 roll-off trucks, 6 tractor trailers, more than 100 trailers and employs about 80 people.

DISCOVERING RDF

One issue Szarkowski noticed in his business was the unrecyclable waste that he would send to the Dallas landfill. After researching through various waste industry publications and literature, Szarkowski stumbled upon an ad for Lindner, with North American headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, in an issue of Renewable Energy from Waste. The ad called for businesses interested in starting a refuse-derived fuel (RDF) line.

Szarkowski spoke with Lindner President Andreas Schwarz, and after receiving a quote on equipment and flying out to Europe to meet with Schwarz, decided to make RDF from his commercial waste using a Lindner system.

The multimilion dollar system, housed in a 19,000-square-foot building, uses an in-floor loading conveyor, a Jupiter 2200 primary shredder, a ferrous magnet, a windsifter, a Komet 2800 HP secondary shredder, a conveyor system, a near-infrared (NIR) scanner and a control system to automatically run the line—a complete, multimillion dollar line from Lindner, Schwarz says.

The Jupiter 2200 primary shredder shreds the commercial waste to 12-inch minus. The material then moves through the ferrous magnet to remove ferrous metals such as iron and steel and an air knife in the windsifter to remove what Schwarz calls “heavies,” or objects such as stones, batteries and nonferrous metals.

After the feedstock is shredded and sorted, it runs through a secondary shredder to create a 2-inch minus fuel cube. The NIR scans the fuel and gives a report back to a computer, which keeps a record of the material’s British thermal unit (Btu) value, moisture content and chlorine levels.

According to Schwarz, the line is capable of running at a rate of 20 tons per hour. The fuel is packaged in a 1¼-inch square between 2 to 4 inches long.

Dallas Recycling is working with a mixture of paper, plastics and rubber. According to Szarkowski, the rubber is used to keep the fuel’s Btu-value high.

The feedstock comes from different sources and varies from tire curing bladders—nonreinforced rubber membranes that form the inner ring of a tire during the manufacturing process—to plastic palettes to large paper sacks. The feedstock will not work with a moisture content of more than 20 percent.

“We’re even working with a distributor that gives us candies,” Szarkowski says. “Sugar is combustible, brings around 10,000 Btus and can be blended with the fuel.”

The company also uses rejected diapers from the factory line, which works in the feedstock because it is made of plastics mixed with paper.

“Whatever we can get our hands on that’s dry,” Szarkowski notes.

According to Schwarz, a consistent input of feedstock and a consistent feedstock also help keep BTU value up and regulated.

Contaminants, especially chlorine that is found in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics, can be dangerous to the equipment, such as filters and smoke stacks, and for the fuel as well.

STILL LEARNING

While researching RDF systems, Szarkowski traveled to landfills in Italy, Germany and Austria to speak with their operators and get tips from them. There, he learned of the dangers of dust explosions.

“In England, there was a dust explosion at a facility that caused $37 million in damage,” he says. “Equipment burnt overnight and was located outside city limits, so a fire department wasn’t called in time.”

According to Schwarz, another component of running a proper RDF line is maintenance—keeping knives adjusted and changed at the proper frequency, and so on.

But the biggest learning curve for Dallas Recycling was its experience with one of its customers.

“Richard saw an opportunity and he went for it,” Schwarz says. “But he found a client that wanted a spec he couldn’t make.”

Around three years ago while searching for customers for his RDF, Szarkowski found a local cement kiln that was interested in his product and placed an order.

While the order was being processed, Szarkowski says, he noticed that the company didn’t specify the density it needed.

“In Europe, they typically make cubes that are 8 to 9 pounds per cubic feet,” he says. “But [companies in Europe] have a different heating system than this kiln.”

“They understand that we’re in the learning process, and they are, too.” -Richard Szarkowski, Dallas Recycling

The kiln needed a more dense material—around 25 pounds per cubic feet—because it needed a feedstock that was similar in weight to the coal it was using, Schwarz says.

Density issues, along with the need to install a separate cubing system to the Lindner line to meet the kiln’s specs, caused a delay in supplying the RDF to the kiln.

“But they understand that we’re in the learning process, and they are, too,” Szarkowski says.

The kiln currently has a three-year contract with Dallas Recycling, and Szarkowski says they plan to extend it. The kiln saves 90 tons of coal per day using the fuel cubes.

FOGGY FUTURE

Szarkowski says he doesn’t give much thought to Dallas Recycling’s future—his age of 65, along with the issues he had in the beginning of his RDF production makes the future a bit foggy in his opinion.

But the learning process will not stop Szarkowksi from creating an environmentally safe alternative for his customers—at least for now.

“Slowly but surely, we are making our customers landfill free,” he says. “Corporations are excited that their trash never sees the landfill.”

The feedstock Szarkowski uses is continuing to grow in volume. Most waste, he says, is paper and plastic with glass falling to the wayside. Creating an RDF can divert these materials from landfill, but finding end users is challenging.

“I wish that we could find more companies who will use RDF, because this material is safer,” Szarkowski says. “I wish more power plants would change their fuel from coal to an alternative fuel so we can get more customers.”

With making the RDF, Schwarz says that sometimes the process is easier said than done. For customers like Szarkowski who are beginners, fully understanding the process from beginning to end is a key element in creating a successful RDF business.

“Fuel making looks easy from the outside, but the devil is in the details,” Schwarz says. “Depending on the source of the material, for example Richard is using commercial and industrial waste that is fairly dry and free of organics, then you won’t have issues later on in the process.”

The author is assistant editor of Renewable Energy from Waste and can be reached at hcrisan@gie.net

In September, Renewable Energy from Waste (REW) magazine announced that it would be expanding its coverage into a comprehensive waste and environmental services publication, Waste Today, in 2017. While the move to broader coverage of this market will fill a gap in coverage of the marketplace for public and private waste services companies, it is a bittersweet transition.

When we launched REW in 2012, we saw great potential for waste conversion technologies. Large firms like Waste Management were heavily investing in new technologies and fossil fuel prices were through the roof. The president was crafting policies to support the generation of clean power and reduced greenhouse gases. It was an active time for the burgeoning industry. Young companies were testing the waters and everyone was excited.

The next four years saw a series of project delays and business failures coupled with record low prices for natural gas and electricity. Investment in waste conversion projects began to slow. Enthusiasm turned into skepticism by some.

The industry isn’t disappearing by any means, but to many, the prospect is much less appealing than when a barrel of oil was over $100. Making the economics work while also gaining support for an industry that hasn’t always lived up to its promises has created a challenging environment, to say the least.

“Making the economics work while also gaining support for an industry that hasn’t always lived up to its promises has created a challenging environment, to say the least.”

Despite those conditions, several successful project also have been developed during the course of our coverage that we will continue to watch. Innovators are still moving forward with projects and see the value conversion technologies can provide as on-site power generation or vehicle fuel. I am certain conditions for waste conversion projects will improve and spark further development.

Waste managers who are considering waste conversion are not just looking for a magic box to make gold out of garbage. These are the leaders of a very complex industry that is as much a societal issue as it is an environmental one. City officials and business owners wanting to understand the best methods to handle waste are the very individuals who have considered or are considering conversion technologies. They are the ones that see value beyond the landfill. They aren’t satisfied until every last piece of trash is reused, reduced, recycled and made into energy.

It’s those companies and thought leaders we will profile in Waste Today. You will read how companies in the waste business for generations are still employing new and innovative ways to manage the ever-changing waste stream efficiently. They are the ones that look at a pile of trash as a treasure not to be buried.

Our coverage of waste conversion is not going away, rather it is going to be further supported by looking at the entire system of waste from generation, to collection and transfer, to processing, recovery and disposal. It is an exciting new chapter that I hope you will join me for.