High Tech Alternatives To Garbage Dumps!

POWER is working to rid our country of toxic landfills and to supplant the age old practice of burying garbage with waste to energy technologies. Through the employment of the new technologies, this country can permanently free itself from dependence on foreign oil and make toxic landfills a thing of the past. Landfills are the largest manmade source of methane gas emissions, roughly 8% of greenhouse gases. Here are just a few of the high tech alternatives to landfills that could be built in any industrial park in the Kankakee area.

1) Ethanol: Coskata, Inc., headquartered in Warrenville, IL. www.coskata.com. GM owns a significant share of this company. They convert municipal solid waste into ethanol. Gasification is combined with fermentation and separation to convert waste to ethanol for about a dollar per gallon.

2) Plasma Arc Gasification: Geoplasma, LLC. (Jacoby Group) www.geoplasma.com. They are building a 3000 ton per day garbage processor which evaporates loads of garbage in 5 seconds in St. Lucie County Fla. Output is electricity and building materials.

3) Plasma Conversion: Startech Environmental, headquartered in Oklahoma with a demo site in Wilton, CT. www.startech.net. They convert garbage into a high butane hydrogen gas which breaks materials down by de-grouping the various chemical compounds and converting them back to their elementary state. They have a plant in Japan and several more under construction throughout the world. They received Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovation Award, "The Best and the Brightest." They were featured on ABC Morning News in April, 04.

4) Thermal Depolymerization: Changing World Technologies, headquartered in Long Island, New York. www.changingworldtech.com. They use garbage to produce oil. Any carbon based product may be converted. It is estimated that 700 million tons of garbage will produce 4 billion barrels of oil annually. This country disposes of over 20 billion tons of garbage per year. It converts waste products to oil in three hours using a process that takes nature hundreds of thousands of years to accomplish. They were featured in articles in Discovery Magazine, May of 03, Money Magazine June of 04 and they were a subject on CBS Evening News, Aug. 03.

5) Gasification: Ze-gen, headquartered in Boston, Ma. www.ze-gen.com. They were founded in 2004. Their technology focus is on changing the carbon content found in conventional solid waste streams into large volumes of zero-emissions syngas to generate electric.

6) Biomass/gasification: World Waste Technologies, headquartered in San Diego Ca.. www.worldwasteintl.com. Their first site is being built in Anaheim Ca. on a Republic Landfill Site. Reduces waste by 90% and sorts recyclables. They are presently building 4 plants in Northern California