MSW Management | Editorial

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Connecting the Dots

By Kay Martin

Meteorologists and smart investors share a common passion. They track the potential of critical elements to periodically converge and spawn dramatic events. This is the stuff of perfect storms, political movements, scientific breakthroughs, and industrial revolutions.

One such convergence—the energy-climate crisis—has recently commanded center stage in the national and international communities. Over the past five years, environmental mantras have graduated from resource conservation and biodiversity to more overarching renewable energy and global warming initiatives.

Reputable scholars continue to debate the science. But the average layman has begun to connect the dots between increasing fossil fuel dependency, diminishing supply, geopolitical instability, national security, and global pollution. The image of Earth as a fragile planet in desperate need of a clean-energy future has permeated the public consciousness, mobilized policy makers, and peaked the interest of venture capitalists.

Meeting future clean-energy needs will require the development of a new industrial platform capable of producing low-carbon fuels, chemicals, and power from renewable domestic sources. Lucrative markets await alternative transportation fuels such as ethanol, biodiesel, butanol, and hydrogen that can be mass-produced from various types of biomass. Investors are already positioning themselves on the ground floor with promising bioenergy technologies and critical feedstock supply lines. While attention to date has been focused on corn, soybeans, and other dedicated crops, biomass wastes are emerging as the future industrial feedstocks of choice.

Three factors—sustainability, accessibility, and cost—are key. Utilization of waste biomass avoids crop-production impacts on land and water resources, as well as competition with existing food, feed, and fiber markets. Biomass wastes are also abundant and readily available. Many of these materials, such as food-processing residues and MSW, are already being aggregated in large quantities at locations strategic to major transportation corridors. Finally, biomass wastes are the cheapest industrial feedstocks. Materials that currently pose an economic liability for generators may be acquired at a negative cost by energy producers, or turned into new profit centers for generators through creative industrial partnerships.

The impact of bioenergy development on solid waste systems will be enormous and unprecedented. The waste business is certainly no stranger to radical change. The recycling movement of the ’90s turned the materials-management pyramid virtually upside down. But the marriage of MSW residuals with new clean-energy industries is a different kind of animal.

Recycling is essentially a supply-side strategy that sends “materials looking for industries.” The emerging bioenergy platform, in contrast, creates a demand-pull in the marketplace, and sends “industries looking for materials.” The essential convergence of elements is enough to make the traditional recycler drool: new domestic growth industries seeking bargain domestic feedstocks to produce lucrative products for sustainable domestic markets.

The net effect of these market forces will be a dramatic shift toward upstream management of residual waste materials that are now being burned or buried. In many respects, novel uses of post-recycled fractions for fuel and chemical production represent a logical next step in the “gentrification” of the wastestream. It is a step, however, that will require the development of advanced separation technologies and a significant retooling of waste-processing facilities.

Tomorrow’s premier dirty MRFs will be capable of sorting complex heterogeneous streams into specification feedstocks for a variety of bioenergy technologies. This new separation infrastructure will be developed through direct industry partnerships with existing providers or independently by the industries themselves. As with the recycling revolution, it will introduce new market participants, enhance wastestream competition, and create market displacement in some sectors.

Since these changes have their impetus outside the solid waste industry, they are progressing internally with little attention or fanfare. This time around there will be no cornerstone agendas issued by the EPA to combat vanishing landfill space; neither will there be a plethora of state laws to mandate the three Rs.

Instead, economic drivers for significant new landfill diversion will be set in motion by laws governing greenhouse gas reduction, renewable-fuel and renewable-power standards, and carbon trading. The pivotal role of waste feedstocks in the accomplishment of these public policy goals is familiar ground for scientists and entrepreneurs. It remains for regulators, environmentalists, and solid waste service providers to connect the dots. What will it take?

For regulators, it will take the crafting of an enlightened and enabling regulatory framework for green industries that is cross-media in scope and capable of netting environmental benefits. The perception of residual wastes as materials in need of destruction, containment, or long-term stewardship must be exchanged for one of the residual materials prepared as industrial inputs. Clear jurisdictional boundaries must be drawn between “wastes” and “feedstocks,” and between waste handling and industrial processes.

For environmentalists, it will take walking the talk on the old credo of “think globally, act locally.” This means abandoning outdated or inflexible waste-management hierarchies, eschewing parochialism and facilitated NIMBYism, becoming educated on the nature and potential of new technologies, and pursuing advocacy partnerships with regulators and developers for promotion of a green-industry platform.

Finally, for solid waste service providers, it will take incorporating alternative wastestream management strategies into long-range business plans and pursuing creative partnerships with new technology and product market developers. The potential reach of bioenergy companies into the solid waste arena should give pause to the architects of major landfill expansions. If you build it, they may not come. And that would be very bad for the bottom line, but very good for ol’ planet Earth.

Kay Martin, Ph.D., is vice president of the BioEnergy Producers Association.

MSW - July/August 2007