Council looking at ways to fund recycling plant

By Cassie Tomlin

Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008 | midnight

All of the key players are on board for reducing the trash Boulder City buries in its landfill. The City Council, city staff, Southern Nevada Health District and the landfill operators support the idea. But recruiting a garbage-recycling plant to do just that depends entirely on who would pay for it.

The city says it can't fit any experimental projects into its budget. Picking up the cost of a pilot plant isn't the responsibility of Southern Nevada Health District or Boulder Disposal, the company that collects and buries the town's waste.

So the City Council Nov. 12 will consider drafting a request for proposal to ask entrepreneurs to build a plant and bring a bankroll.

"The city shouldn't be spending its own money to do research and development," Councilman Travis Chandler, who introduced the measure, said at the Oct. 14 council meeting. "Nevertheless, whoever does it should tell us where to get the money with a letter of intent."

At the council meeting, two men from Victorville, Calif., told the city they would submit a plan for reclaiming oil from trash, and they would pay for it.

That's something the council has heard before. Mike Little, the man who brought the idea to Boulder City, earlier this year told council members he had secured enough funding to bring a machine to eat local trash, but a few months later said he wouldn't work for free, suggesting the city could bring him on as a consultant.

On Oct. 15, Chandler, Councilwoman Linda Strickland, City Manager Vicki Mayes, Director of Public Works Scott Hansen, Boulder Disposal General Manager Robert Martello and Health District Environmental Health Engineer Walter Ross visited an experimental trash-crushing autoclave at the Crazy Horse Canyon Landfill in Salinas, Calif.

Neither Ross nor Martello returned repeated phone calls and e-mails about the trip.

The governmental agency that manages trash in Salinas and the surrounding areas bought machine, built in Reno by Comprehensive Resources, Recovery and Reuse Inc., for $100,000, a representative said.

The autoclave, one of two in the country, conveys municipal solid waste from the garbage truck into a cement mixer-like basin, where it is heated and mixed with steam and water and turned it into a mulch-like substance.

Screens sort the broken-down waste from the recycling and the other leftovers— the stuff that isn't glass and aluminum, but doesn't get broken down, that goes into the ground in the end.

From Salinas, the mulch goes to a U.S. Department of Agriculture facility that is studying the best way to make energy out of it — either microbial digestion for methane manufacturing or converting the organic pulp into ethanol.

The landfill operators have run about 15 tests with the machine since May and performed one for the Boulder City group during its visit.

Crazy Horse Canyon, a 74-acre landfill that last year took in 163,600 tons of municipal solid waste, is set to close in May 2009 because it will be full. The autoclaving experiment aims to find a way to put less trash into the ground, to prevent more landfill closures in the area.

The Boulder City landfill takes in about 80 tons of trash a day, and Mayes said the city should have a solid estimate this month of the waste stream specifics, something it needs before asking for plans on the trash reprocessing.

After the visit, Hansen said he was impressed with the technology, which he predicts will catch on in the future. Currently, money is a setback, he said.

"Boulder City has a small landfill operation compared to other locations, so I am sure it would be difficult to get a good return on investing in a full scale project," he said in an e-mail. "If we could build and operate a waste-to-energy plant without raising rates to our residents, we would jump on it."

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