Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Boulder City officials look into energy-producing landfill program

City officials will travel to California Oct. 15 to visit a place that incinerates and pummels its trash to pulp to study how to turn the mass into energy.

Locals have heard about the technology in two City Council visits from Mike Little, a proponent, but soon Boulder City officials will see for themselves an autoclaving, trash-diverting machine in action at the Crazy Horse Canyon Landfill near Salinas, Calif.

Council members Linda Strickland and Travis Chandler will travel with City Manager Vicki Mayes and Public Works Director Scott Hansen to see the technology, which Little has advocated for use in the municipal Boulder City Landfill, which is nearing its capacity.

Two representatives of the Southern Nevada Health District and Robert Martello, general manager of Boulder Disposal, the municipal landfill operator, also are planning to attend.

The visit will provide a demonstration of the equipment and insight into how the program works, and it will start a dialogue about the potential problems and limitations of installing one here, Mayes said.

The city has been cautious about making a financial commitment to a similar program, because the pilot in Salinas is one of two functioning in the country.

Little said he won't join city officials on the trip.

The last time he made a presentation to the council, the members said they eventually would open bids to any providers of the technology to obtain the most efficient and logical program.

"I've done what I can do in Boulder City," Little said. "I've left it with them to do an investigation on the operation and to look for alternative developers to provide the same services."

Susan Warner, diversion manager for Salinas Valley Solid Waste Authority, said the pilot program has been functioning since April at Crazy Horse Canyon Landfill, which is set for closure in May 2009 because it will be full.

The Solid Waste Authority, a governmental collaborative, manages that landfill and one other for five cities in the Salinas Valley.

A partnership between that group and the Salinas City Council leased the autoclaving machine from Reno, she said.

She doesn't have a cost estimate for how much the Solid Waste Authority has spent on the experimental program, but said the authority paid $100,000 to CR3, the company that constructed the machine.

Crazy Horse Canyon is a 74-acre landfill that last year took in 163,600 tons of municipal solid waste. The autoclaving experiment aims to find a way to put less trash into the ground, Warner said.

The pilot machine looks like a cement mixer in a metal building at the landfill. Its basin has a two-ton capacity. Trash is conveyed into the machine, which is then rotated for about two hours and filled with steam and hot oil to 270 degrees.

The remnants are then conveyed out of the autoclave and through a series of three screens that filter remaining trash out of the mulch-like material.

The idea is to use the mulch for ethanol production or biogas, she said.

Two employees, one provided by CR3, and one from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, run the machine, Warner said.

She said the process has worked well to create mulch, but the Solid Waste Authority hasn't determined whether the mulch can be used in energy manufacturing. Preliminary tests have been inconclusive, she said.

Even without energy production, the autoclaving has shown benefits, she said.

"If all we did was process it, the volume reduction would be 65 percent," Warner said. "Certainly the intention is to find highest and best use and eliminate the need for landfilling."

She said doesn't know the fate of the machine when Crazy Horse Canyon Landfill closes next year.

"I'm certainly hoping it has a place in our future in a scale larger than the pilot, but we're still in the process of evaluation the best technology," she said.

Cassie Tomlin can be reached at 948-2073 or [email protected].

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