Run your car on recycled rubbish

A new type of process can turn waste into bioethanol
Danny Fortson

Yesterday, like every day, you produced 3lb of rubbish. A third of it will be recycled, and some of it will be burnt. Most of it, though, will be tossed into a hole in the ground to rot away over several decades.
As it decays it will generate methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more harmful than carbon dioxide, and leachate, a putrid black liquid that must be pumped out of the ground to keep it from fouling the water table. Some material, such as plastics, will never break down fully.
The government is, belatedly, trying to change Britain’s standing as among the worst recyclers in western Europe. It has imposed a swingeing landfill tax that is rising every year. The scramble to avoid it has led to a new generation of rubbish tycoons, all hoping to cash in on the move to waste less and recycle more.
One of them is Philip Hall. The 62-year-old serial entrepreneur has developed a technology that converts waste into bioethanol, a green alternative to petrol. His company, Reclaim Resources, built its first demonstration plant in Bournemouth last year.
The idea came to him in 2005, when an incinerating company asked his previous firm, X Technology, to fit its odour-control kit to its ovens.
Hall said: “We either set fire to our garbage or bury it. I thought, there has to be a better way.” The result was Reclaim’s Vantage Waste Processor, which blasts rubbish with high-pressure steam as it passes through a giant rotating cylinder. The process breaks down all organic material into fine fibres with high calorific value. The plastic and metal is removed and taken away for recycling.
The biological leftovers are converted into sugars through hydrolysis and acid treatment and then fed into large fermentation tanks. These break them down into fuel that can be blended for use in cars and aircraft or to feed the gas turbines of a power station.
Turning the country’s waste into a limitless source of biofuel sounds too good to be true — and so far that seems to be the view taken by Britain’s councils and developers.
The company’s handful of orders are all from foreign firms. “I have to say the UK has been pretty disappointing,” said Hall. “The real interest is coming from the developing world — China, Malaysia, Russia. I imagine the first 30 plants will be built overseas before we have one running in England.”
What is certain is that Britain needs to do better with its waste. We bury 58% of the 220m tonnes of waste we produce every year. By 2013, landfilling must be cut to half of 1995 levels. If that level is not achieved, Britain will violate the EU landfill directive and be subject to hefty fines.
To prod the industry into action, the government has raised landfill taxes and offered generous subsidies for waste-to-energy developers. AMA Research, an American consultancy, said Britain will have to invest £30 billion to put the infrastructure into place.
Apart from Reclaim’s demonstrator plant in Bournemouth it has made only one other unit and is near to completing a third in Latvia, where labour costs are a fraction of those in Britain. Hall has sunk £3m of his own money and cash from private investors into the company and is now trying to raise another £10m to step up production.
Hall’s is just one of a handful of waste-to-energy alternatives being developed. Anaerobic digestion, for example, uses giant steel tanks filled with microbes to break down organic waste. J Sainsbury, the supermarket group, is building several anaerobic digestors to get rid of date-expired food. The process takes 40 days.
Reclaim, on the other hand, takes only three days to start producing ethanol and then its plant can operate continuously.
A syndicate of underwriters has enough confidence in the technology to offer performance bonds covering loss of income in case the ethanol production is less than capacity. “As long as there is a continuous waste source,” Hall said, “it’s like a tap.”