MSW and the Promise of Biotechnology

August 25, 2015

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by James L. Stewart (MSW Management/Biofuels Digest) When it comes to its progress in achieving zero waste to landfills, the United States is on a par with Slovenia and the Czech Republic. -- On average, the top eight countries in Europe for landfill diversion (Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway) are putting just 2% of their solid wastes into landfills. Each is recycling and composting at least 50% of its wastes, and collectively they employ 228 thermal waste-to-energy (WTE) plants—exactly one-half of all such plants in Europe—to treat their residuals for energy recovery. Germany and Switzerland now report that they have achieved zero waste  to landfills.

The German Federal Environment Agency estimates that the energy generated by its 80 thermal plants saves some 9.75 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) annually by replacing fossil fuels like coal or oil.

In the US, MSW generation has hovered around 250 million tons per year for the past decade. In recent years, about 35% has been recycled or composted and another 12% has been incinerated for energy recovery. As a nation, we are still landfilling more than half of the solid waste we create.

When it comes to its progress in achieving zero waste to landfills, the US is on a par with Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

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The European and Asian experience compels regulators in North America  to modify their definitions of recycling to include not only finished products, but the recovery and reuse of carbon at the molecular level. At a minimum, public jurisdictions should be allowed to obtain landfill diversion credit whenever MSW residuals are converted to syngas (composed primarily of hydrogen and carbon monoxide) and reconstituted into electricity, liquid energy, or biobased chemicals, from which a wide array of biobased products can be produced.

Despite all best intentions, the goal of zero waste to landfills cannot be achieved through the recycling of finished products and composting alone.

Such a policy would be consistent with California law, which 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,” words which the state’s bureaucracy has steadfastly refused to put into effect.

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Only Canada’s Enerkem commissioned a commercial scale biorefinery that uses MSW residuals as a feedstock for the production of biofuels and chemicals. It will annually gasify 100,000 dry tonnes of post-recycled solid waste, initially to produce 10 million gallons of biomethanol, a chemical intermediate, and later cellulosic ethanol. It is part of an integrated waste management system for the City of Edmonton where 20% of the city’s waste is recycled, 40% is composted, and 30% is used to produce biofuels. The project has increased the city’s landfill diversion rate from 60% to 90%.

7 Reasons why Conversion Technologies have come up short, to date

After a decade-long effort and billions of dollars of expenditure, CTs have yet to fulfill their promise in addressing one of North America’s primary environmental goals —reducing the 125 million tons of post-recycled MSW that come to rest in our nation’s landfills each year.

Why? The reasons are clear:

Nothing discourages capital investment more than federal regulatory uncertainty. ...

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Commodity price instability: ...

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Entrenched opposition: ...

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Price Competition: ...

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Consistent, homogenous feedstock is critical to the MSW conversion process. ...

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Feedstock aggregation: Firm feedstock and offtake agreements, contracts for 10 years of more, are normally required for debt financing. ...

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State regulatory uncertainty. ...

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California’s astonishing inaction on waste

During the past 10 years, California has landfilled approximately 340 million tons of municipal solid waste, much of which has not even been segregated for standard cans-and-bottles recycling, but instead is collected and sent directly to landfilling.

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Further, the state’s Air Resources Board has acknowledged that organic waste is one of the only feedstocks that, on a life-cycle basis, will meet the emissions reduction objectives of California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard. Its staff once declared that 24 waste-to-biofuels facilities would be required in the state by 2020 to assist in meeting the goals of this program.

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Solena Fuels, in partnership with British Airways, has targeted 2017 for completion of a biorefinery east of London that will annually produce approximately 42 million gallons of sustainable jet fuel and diesel. Solena will employ its patented single-phase, high-temperature plasma gasification system and the modified fixed-bed, microchannel Fischer-Tropsch process of Velocys to convert 575,000 metric tons of post-recycled MSW, wood waste and agricultural waste to jet fuel and diesel. British Airways has made a long-term commitment to purchase all 17.5 million gallons of the jet fuel produced by the facility each year at market competitive rates.

E2 Environmental Entrepreneurs, in its 2014 Advanced Biofuel Market Report, identified seven companies in the US and Canada that are pursuing technologies capable of producing advanced biofuels from mixed MSW feedstocks. These are defined as technologies whose carbon intensity is at least 50% below that of petroleum, as measured by the California Air Resources Board.

The 2014 E2 report predicted that 34 advanced biofuels plants will be on line by 2017, but only six of these were expected to process MSW, and three of them are projects of Enerkem. Only Fulcrum and Fiberight were expected to commission additional MSW-related biorefineries by that date.

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After initially focusing on ethanol, Fulcrum has moved to the production of a syncrude that can be upgraded to “drop-in” jet fuel or diesel.

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Fiberight has operated a demonstration facility in Lawrenceburg, VA, for more than 5,000 hours, that involves MSW feedstock pre-treatment, including pulping, and enzymatic hydrolysis to produce industrial sugars that can be sold as is or fermented to produce ethanol. After EPA ruled that CNG produced from biogas qualifies as advanced biofuel and for D3 RINs, Fiberight put on hold its plans to convert organic residuals to ethanol at its shuttered Blairstown, IA, ethanol plant, and now plans to employ anaerobic digestion to produce CNG from C5 sugars at a 300 ton-per-day MSW shredding and sorting facility in Marion, IA. In Maine, it is pursuing the same concept, only larger, through a public-private partnership formed to process the MSW of 187 mid-coast communities.

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Among its feedstocks, Kiverdi can gasify MSW as its first step in producing high-value oils and chemicals for such product applications as detergents, biomaterials and fuel additives. READ MORE