A Decade of Progress in California? Not for Its Recycling Rate
by Jim Stewart (Bioenergy Producers Association/Renewable Energy Project Development and Finance/Biofuels Digest) The volume of post-recycled municipal solid waste (MSW) being placed in California’s landfills has been steadily climbing for the past decade, during which time the state’s legislature, with its waste management agency following meekly behind, has refused to amend repressive statutes and regulations that prevent the use of non-combustion thermal technologies to address the problem.
These roadblocks that have prevented pyrolysis and gasification technologies from converting MSW feedstocks into biofuels, chemicals and other biobased products have remained in place for over two decades. This despite the fact that in 2011, when the state’s recycling rate was at 49% and landfilling was at 29.9 million tons of solid waste annually, the legislature passed Assembly Bill 341 establishing a statewide goal of 75% recycling, to be achieved by this year.
Then in 2016 came SB 1383, which required a 50% reduction in the level of the statewide disposal of organic waste from the 2014 level by 2020 and a 75% reduction by 2025.
The problem is that these goals were to be achieved only through the use of source reduction, traditional recycling practices and composting.
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During the seven years since the passage of AB 341, annual disposal has increased by almost ten million tons, and in the first six months of 2019 (the latest period reported) it totaled 21.7 million tons, an increase of 8% over the prior year.
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According to the agency’s own website, to meet its 2020 goal of 75% recycling, the state this year would have to reduce, recycle, or compost an additional 23 million tons of material currently going to landfills. It estimates that 80 million tons of solid waste will be generated this year. Therefore, to meet its 75% goal, approximately one-half of the post-recycled solid waste currently being landfilled would need to be source reduced, recycled, or composted — an impossibility.
Expressed another way, it has been estimated that, under CalRecycle’s current policies, to meet its 75% recycling goal would require the construction of 110 additional anaerobic digestion and composting facilities — and it is questionable whether there would be markets for the residuals.
This goal has been made even more difficult by the fact that, as of this year, credit for landfill diversion is no longer allowed for green waste when it is used as alternative daily cover. This will increase the volume of waste recorded as being landfilled, or worse, force the increased open field burning of these residues.
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Theoretically, with today’s proven technologies, the approximately 42 million tons of solid waste that were placed in landfills last year could have supported the production of more than 1.6 billion gallons of low carbon fuel.
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Section 40180 defines recycling as “the process of collecting, sorting, cleansing, treating, and reconstituting of materials that would otherwise become solid waste, and returning them to the economic mainstream in the form of raw material for new, reused, or reconstituted products, which meet the quality standards necessary to be used in the marketplace.”
This process, also known as molecular recycling, involves changing the form or structure of something, whereas CalRecycle, in its AB 341 planning and other policy making, has maintained that recycling comprises only material segregation, collection, and sorting.
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California Air Resources Board has long recognized organic waste as one of the only feedstocks that, on a life-cycle basis, can meet the emissions reduction objectives of its Low Carbon Fuel Standard. As early as 2010, its staff declared that, to assist in meeting this goal by 2020, 24 new waste-to-biofuels facilities would be needed in the state —18 cellulosic ethanol biorefineries and six new biodiesel/renewable diesel plants. Not one has been completed.
The projects
However, at least five projects are now in development in the San Joaquin Valley that will apply gasification or pyrolysis to the productive disposal of agricultural residues. This is possible because the State’s repressive gasification definition and its regulations relating to MSW do not apply to single stream cellulosic wastes.
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Approximately one million tons of orchard and vineyard removals were permitted for open field burning last year. Finding solutions for the disposal of agricultural residues has become a problem of “life and death” proportions for this $50 billion industry, and conversion technologies will ultimately play a major role in addressing this issue.
Hopefully, these projects in California’s Central Valley will open the way for thermal technologies to access a broader array of biogenic wastes and residuals as feedstocks, including many fractions of MSW.
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Conversion technologies can handle the entire post-recycled organic waste stream—food and green waste plus all of the feedstocks named above, even fossil-based materials like plastics. These technologies could repurpose underused waste plastics not into fuel, but into new non-fuel, non-packaging and non-container products, helping to reduce the demand for petroleum, and leaving combustion products – fuel or energy — to be produced from the low carbon biogenic components of the waste steam.
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Of the various strategies analyzed in the report (“Getting to Neutral” released in January by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), it concluded that “gasifying biomass to make hydrogen fuel and CO2 has the largest promise for CO2 removal at the lowest cost and aligns with the State’s goals on renewable hydrogen.” READ MORE
Getting to Neutral: Options for Negative Carbon Emissions in California (Livermore Lab Foundation)
Click here to read LLNL’s January 30 announcement
Download the Executive Summary
