BAY MINETTE, Ala. — The city of Bay Minette is in phase 1 of a project using recyclable materials to produce diesel fuel and waste produced by that process will produce electricity.

Cello Energy is partnering with the city to purchase the city's waste and in return provide the city with diesel at a discounted rate.

The city will keep records of the benefits of the diesel to determine it's efficiency and economic benefits.

Phase 1 is being led by private consulting engineer David Gamble. Gamble was hired by the city through a grant to conduct a study of the "economic benefits from a commercial cellulosic diesel plant in Bay Minette."

Gamble is charged with several duties, to be presented in a report in May of this year.

"(Gamble) is to identify composition and form of collected materials that will be acceptable to the Cello-D processing facility; sources and quantities of the materials to be collected; best practices and equipment for the collection of these wastes that is acceptable to the municipal processing facility that will produce the feedstock to the Cello-D processing facility; best equipment for the processing of these wastes so as to produce the feed stock that is acceptable to Cello-D processing facility; potential sites for the collection and processing facilities as anticipated by this program; and evaluate the best procedure for collecting and separating municipal solid waste and yard waste for processing into diesel.

 He said there are two types of  waste, municipal solid waste (MSW), which is household waste, and Construction and Demolition (C and D) waste.

"MSW has a lot of recyclable material," he said, which includes organic based waste such as paper, food and tree limbs.

He said there are also two forms of recycling - single sort and curbside.

"With single sort, trucks would bring everything to one place. Waste leaves your household commingled just as if it were going to landfill," he said. "Single sort would prove to be economical. It would produce five streams of material: feedstock for the energy plant, metals, glass, plastics and residuals, which is the stuff to go to the landfill."

Fairhope and Daphne have curbside recycling for residential and commercial customers, who separate out the recyclable materials themselves.

Gamble said his observation of curbside recycling is based on Fairhope's recycling program.

"(That program) brings in $150,000. The cost of garbage disposal at landfill is $210,000. However, they're still spending money. The cost of curbside recycling is $4 per person per year for population of 14,600," he said.

Gamble said a recycling program would account for an 80 percent reduction of waste going to the landfill, however, the price for recycled goods has decreased during recent months.

"Right now, waste has a negative cost associated with it," Gamble said.

"Waste paper, six months ago, sold for $125 a ton. Today it is only worth $25 a ton," he said. "Aluminum cans, steel, other metals dropped dramatically. It has cast a shadow on the economics of curbside recycling.

"At the end of the day we want to do some things that have positive impact. We have to balance the recycling side versus the cost to achieve recycling side.

"The City of Bay Minette for example, currently produces 5,000 tons a year of waste total. That goes to the transfer station then to Magnolia landfill," he said. "There is no real recycling at the transfer station."

To a point, he's right. Buford King, energy conservation program manager and former assistant landfill operations manager, said when waste is brought to the transfer station, certain items are separated out.

"When trucks bring waste to the transfer station, we segregate scrap metal and a scrap metal recycling company comes and gets it," King said. "A battery recycling company comes and gets (automotive) batteries. We keep household debris separate from construction debris."

He said tires are very difficult  and "annoying" to dispose of, which is where Cello Energy could benefit the city and county. One of the materials used in the making of cellulosic diesel is old tires.

Once waste arrives at the landfill, it is again sorted, separating out things that can be recycled including wood, cardboard and concrete.

"We convert wood into mulch, concrete into road-building material (gravel, etc.), and produce compost to sell to the public," King said.

"We make compost out of vegetative material like limbs, trees, grass clippings, and leaves. We grind it up and allow it to decompose and turn it into compost," he said. "We spread it into rows where it is allowed to decompose. It is then taken to compost facility where it goes through a screening process that screens out garbage."

He said the Magnolia Landfill receives 400 tons of waste per day. That does not include the C and D waste that is accepted at the McBride Landfill in Loxley or a third landfill in Elberta. The two latter landfills accept only C and D waste.

In addition to the large-size recycling done at the landfill, King said the county has residential recycling, but not curbside.

"It's strictly voluntary," he said. "Containers are stationed around Bay Minette. There is one at the transfer station, one across the street from the administrative building and one at Bay Minette Middle School."

He said the large green containers stationed throughout county, are emptied and hauled to a recycling facility in Loxley.

"They pay us for that material, then they broker it to people who grind it up and melt it down into other products," he said. "Things that can be recycled are cardboard, paper products and aluminum cans."

He said recycling saves space in the landfill, but also helps save the environment.

"Garbage takes a very long time to decompose because it's covered with dirt, so no air can get to it to help it decompose," he said. "Plastic material can take up to 400 or 500 years to decompose and paper products around 20 to 30 years."

Bay Minette produces about 5,000 tons of waste a year. The county charges $20 per ton to dispose of C and D waste and $30 per ton to dispose of household waste.

"You take 5,000 tons of usable material and instead of paying $30 ton to put in landfill, you sell it for $1 a ton. That's $150,000 in potential savings," Gamble said. "But you have to spend some money sorting through and finding stuff. How much will it cost to do it? That is part of my job.

Though the city would save money on the waste disposal side, Gamble said it may not be enough to justify the city's own recycling program.

"The question is, who does it benefit?," Gamble asked. "What Cello offers is a way to use recyclable and non-recyclable materials,   but it would take 400 tons a day of MSW, that's what we from an economic scale would need.

"On the economy of scale, that is not something we can do on a small scale and be economically viable, he said. "We would have to have 400 tons a day to have a viable recycling program. That's 5,000 tons a year or 25 tons a day, versus 400 tons a day."

Additionally, he said, the program would need two recycling operations.

"C and D has to be handled differently because it's bulky. It requires different equipment," he said. "The City would need two operations, one for C and D and one for MSW.

"What we want to try to do is create a benefit, to provide something of value and lower cost to the city," he said. "But not at the sake of throwing money away. Doing recycling at the cost of the city is not worth it."

He said the cellulosic process recycles 60 percent of MSW, and about 66 pounds of MSW is equal to one gallon of diesel fuel.

Another question Gamble said had to be considered was where to put the recycling program.

"Where do you put it, at a recycling center or at the landfill?," he said.

"Ultimately the right thing to do is put the recycling center at Magnolia Landfill. That would probably be the most economic plan."

He explained that the landfill already had what was needed for a recycling center.

"It would be the absolute best use of existing infrastructure, allows for landfill life to be extended significantly and makes use of land already zoned for handling MSW," he said. "It has the least negative economic and environmental impact to community as a whole and the greatest possible impact on the economy. We can't keep burying our resources in the ground."

The county has been looking into doing business with Cello Energy as well, and agrees that the landfill would be the best place for a full recycling program.

"Our staff has been in contact with Cello Energy to learn about their technology and monitor their progress in getting their technology fully operational," Michael Thompson, county administrator said. "However, we are also monitoring other technologies with promise.

"Our focus is to one, minimize the volume of waste going into the landfill because there is a substantial cost in constructing and permitting expansions of the facility; and two, create a useful byproduct from the waste that could reduce the cost of energy, liquid or electrical, to the county and other local governments."

Gamble agreed a county-wide recycling program could work.

"Baldwin County as a whole produces 110,000 tons of MSW per year and 70,000 tons of C and D waste per year," he said.

"We're all assigned to be good stewards of our resources. We have to band together with other citizens in the community to make use of those resources."

Thompson said if Bay Minette were to begin recycling, it would impact the landfill, but he said he feels the landfill makes a better choice for a waste to energy program because it is already the site for waste collection.

"This would reduce the total volume of material going into the landfill by some percentage. I think it is important to understand that these technologies require certain specifications associated to the material feeding their process.

"This means that a garbage truck can't just pull up and offload their truck at the plant."

He said the technology needed for such a program is not simple.

"All of the potential technologies that I have seen require a fairly sophisticated process of sorting material. For example, some of the waste to fuel technologies do not want glass, metal, certain types of plastic, drywall or mattresses going into their process.

"Some also require the material to be chipped or ground to a certain size. So the question really becomes what is the best way to handle sorting of waste material? Is it most efficient and least costly at the county level where all of the waste goes to today and a single sorting facility can be established, or at multiple sites around the county?"

Thompson said more information is needed before making that decision.

"I don't know that we have the answer today, but I do think it is fair to say that a material investment has to be made in order to implement a sorting facility and volume is key to recouping this investment whether it is farmed out to a company or performed by the local government staff."

Gamble said another benefit of Cello Energy's plant will be its ability to produce electricity from residual waste accumulated through the diesel-making process.

After years in the paper and pulp industry, Gamble said he is very familiar with that process.

"After I graduated from UAB in 1970, I went to work for Rust Engineering. While I was there, I got heavily involved with waste paper recycling," he said. "Waste paper could be used for cardboard, and the production of energy in the paper mills used our waste."

He explained that the process of recycling produces a kind of residual waste that is then used to produce energy.

"The waste is utilized and energy is produced on a very large scale," he said. "We would burn bark in boilers, which would produce steam. The steam turns the generator and provides energy."

Though he said the process is a bit more technologically advanced now, it uses the same premise.

"The same organic material breaks down into carbon-hydrogen form. The hydrogen is produced in liquid form, and the by-products still have energy. They use that to make electricity," he said. "The amount of waste (from the diesel process) Jack (Boykin, inventor of the cellulosic diesel process) has is insignificant."

Gamble pointed out the county is also working on energy production from by-products of garbage.

"The County put out an RFP (request for proposal)  for a renewable energy program, at the landfill. Bids were taken in July, and commissioners are working to negotiate with a company," Gamble said.

Thompson clarified the RFP was for a waste sorting/recycling facility to be located at the landfill.

"This facility would sort material for recycling purposes, such as metal, glass, cardboard, etc. and hopefully help feed appropriate material to a waste to fuel program," he said.

King said the County is also working on a program to produce renewable energy from the existing gas flare.

"Pipes pull gasses produced by the garbage out of the ground. Those pipes are connected underground to bigger pipes and a filter to remove water. Then it forces gas into the flare and burns it," he said. "We have been awarded a grant from ADECA for a generator that we will put next to the flare station. The generator will tap into the flare station. That gas will go into the generator, which will put it into transformers. We'll sell the (electricity produced) to Baldwin EMC.

"We'll have renewable energy made from garbage," he laughed.