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May 25th, 2012:

Technology Partner for Sundrop’s Waste to Gasoline Facility

http://www.waste-management-world.com/index/display/article-display/7447850645/articles/waste-management-world/waste-to-energy/2012/05/Technology_Partner_for_Sundrop_s_Waste_to_Gasoline_Facility.html?cmpid=EnlWMW_WeeklyJune12012

25 May 2012

Gasification based biofuel specialist, company Sundrop Fuels has entered a partnership with technology and engineering supplier ThyssenKrupp Uhdefor what it claimed will be the first commercial scale ‘green gasoline’ production facility in the U.S.

Colorado based Sundrop said that its inaugural plant near Alexandria, Louisiana, will yield up to 50 million gallons (190 million litres) of renewable gasoline annually while also serving as proving ground for its proprietary biomass conversion technologies that will be used for future large-scale facilities.

The company said that it will convert sustainable forest residues and thinnings, combined with natural gas into bio-based green gasoline by using a production process that integrates gasification, gas purification, methanol synthesis and a methanol-to-gasoline (MTG) process.

According to Sundrop its biofuel is ready for immediate use in today’s combustion engines and will be delivered to the marketplacevia the nation’s existing fuels distribution infrastructure. The company’s first production plant will have a capacity of about 3500 barrels of renewable gasoline per day.

As a key element to its first facility, Sundrop said that it will deploy ThyssenKrupp Uhde’s High Temperature Winkler (HTW) gasification process, coupled with other well-established technologies for gas cleanup, methanol synthesis, and the MTG conversion.

Within the plant the company said that it will demonstrate its proprietary process for biomass conversion incorporating the company’s patented RP Reactor?, an ultra high temperature technology that is claimed to generate the highest fuel energy yield per ton of biomass of any biofuels process available.

Sundrop said that it plans to follow its first facility with larger-scale fuels plants producing nearly 300 million gallons (1135 million litres) annually, with a combined production capacity of more than one billion gallons by 2020 – a significant%age of the cellulosic advanced biofuels goal set by the U.S.’s Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS).

The company said that it expects construction to start on the facility later this year.
Read More

Biofuel Specialist Expands Enzyme License from Dyadic
Abengoa Bioenergy New Technologies has agreed to pay enzyme specialist Dyadic International (OTC Pink: DYAI) $5.5 million for an expansion of its rights under a previous non-exclusive license agreement.

Membrane Contract to Boost Waste to Biofuel Efficiency
KmX Corporation has agreed to provide biofuel Fiberight exclusive rights to its membrane aided concentration and dehydration technologies for the conversion of Municipal Solid Waste into ethanol.

160 Million Euro French Algae Project Targets Biofuels from Wastes
French agricultural research organisation, the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) has launched a 160 million Euro collaborative platform aimed at developing efficient biofuels and high added value substances by utilising micro-algae feeding on nutrients contained in waste and industrial emissions of carbon dioxide

Tokyo Waste Management

download PDF : Tokyo Waste Management

Tokyo’s waste reduction and plasma arc

Download PDF : Tokyo’s waste reduction and plasma arc

Report Attacks World Bank for Backing Waste Incineration

by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON – In spite of a global treaty that requires countries to minimize the use of waste incinerators that produce toxic pollutants, the World Bank and its affiliates continue to promote projects in developing countries that include incinerators, according to a coalition of international environmental and health groups.

In a report released here Wednesday, the Washington-based Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), a grouping of some 375 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in 40 countries, and the Manila-based Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance (GAIA), charge that the Bank Group has funded or recommended funding at least 156 projects that include incineration, in 68 countries, since 1993.

That was the same year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identified incinerators as the country’s primary source of dangerous airborne dioxin and mercury emissions, both of which are highly toxic to humans.

Since 2001, some 26 projects that included incineration components, have gained the Bank Group’s backing, adds the report.

”It’s outrageous that a public institution like the World Bank is using public money to destroy public health,” said Von Hernandez, GAIA co-ordinator in the Philippines. ”The Bank must immediately stop funding incineration.”

The report, ‘Bankrolling Polluting Technology: The World Bank and Incineration’, was released on the eve of this year’s annual meeting here of the Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where NGOs are expected to turn out in force to urge major reforms in the lending policies of the two international financial institutions (IFIs) affecting a range of issues, from tropical deforestation to privatization.

The new report, based on an analysis of World Bank documents, charges that the Bank is promoting a technology in poor countries that has largely been repudiated, or in some cases banned outright, in developed nations.

The incineration of industrial, health-care, and municipal wastes has become an increasingly contentious health and environmental issue in recent years.

Incinerators produce large quantities of gaseous, solid and sometimes liquid residues that are often contaminated with toxic substances, such as heavy metals, dioxins, furans and other so-called persistent organic pollutants, or POPs.

Dioxins are particularly dangerous. They have been shown to cause a wide range of health problems, including cancer, immune system damage, reproductive and developmental problems. They also ”bio-accumulate” in the fatty tissues of living organisms and are passed up the food chain, especially concentrating in fish, eggs, and diary products, without decomposing.

Governments have increasingly recognized the dangers posed by the production of POPs.

In 2001, nations approved the United Nations Stockholm Convention on POPs, a global treaty that requires participating nations to minimize their production of certain, particularly toxic POPs – including dioxins and furans – and to eventually ban 23 of the most dangerous substances. The same treaty identified incineration as a major source of these chemical compounds.

In wealthy countries, technology has been devised to mitigate – although not eliminate – air pollution caused by incinerators, but its expense is beyond the reach of most poor countries.

”Increasing pollution in regions already suffering from widespread health problems due to by-products of combustion, such as particulates, POPS, and mercury is especially unsustainable and threatening to public health,” the report said.

Poor countries also generally lack the kind of regulatory, environmental, and public-health systems needed to ensure that incinerators are in fact minimizing toxic emissions.

The report stressed that viable alternatives to incineration exist for most hazardous wastes. Health-care waste, for example, is composed primarily of non-infectious waste similar to general municipal waste. Maintaining separate waste streams for potentially infectious and non-infectious material has been shown to be both inexpensive and cost-effective.

In addition, aggressive recycling and compost programs can reduce much municipal waste, while non-burn treatments have been developed for the most hazardous contents. On industrial wastes, the best policies, according to the report, are preventative: reducing or eliminating hazardous industrial inputs.

The report stressed that of the 156 projects backed by the Bank, only three – in Singapore, Mauritius, and South Korea – were primarily concerned with incineration. In the rest, incineration was a secondary or minor aspect of the project.

Of the total projects in which incineration was included, half are in Africa, where Kenya was the global leader with 12; 22 percent in Asia and the Pacific; 19 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean; and 10 percent in Europe.

But almost half of all were concentrated in just 12 countries: Kenya, Brazil, Turkey, India, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Mexico, Argentina, South Korea, Zambia, China, and Nigeria.

The incineration capacities of these projects vary greatly, the report says, noting that the Singapore incinerator may burn as much waste as all other Bank-backed incinerators combined.

About 50 percent of the projects involve incineration of a wide variety of industrial and manufacturing wastes; about 29 percent handle health-care wastes; and the remainder, general municipal wastes. Twelve of the 19 projects that include municipal waste incineration are related to tourism, including luxury hotels in remote locations.

The World Bank itself established a POPs Unit with the goal of improving ”various operational policies by integrating POPs issues” after the Stockholm Convention was signed.

It also has policies that prevent it from lending to projects that use certain pesticides that are POPs, according to the report. The Bank also supports projects designed to clean up existing POPs stockpiles – such as those abandoned by multinational pesticide companies in Africa – and to help countries move away from reliance on POP-producing technologies.

”It’s particularly hypocritical that the World Bank is seeking funds to clean up POPs problems at the same time that it continues to create new ones,” said Neil Tangri, the report’s author. He cited a 1999 New York Times article that reported that the Bank’s president, James Wolfensohn, personally contributed 50,000 dollars to an effort to prevent the construction of a mixed hazardous waste incinerator at his vacation home in Wyoming.

The report stressed that a number of groups represented by the coalition have tried to engage the World Bank directly on these issues but ”received little constructive response”. Asked about the Bank’s reaction, spokespersons from the Bank and its private-sector affiliate, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) said they had not yet seen the report.

© 2002 lPS

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Download PDF : The World Bank Group and Incineration

European Parliament decisions

European Parliament info

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=REPORT&mode=XML&reference=A7-2012-161&language=EN

includes:

Calls on the Commission to streamline the waste acquisition, taking into account the waste hierarchy and the need to bring residual waste close to zero; calls on the Commission, therefore, to make proposals by 2014 with a view to gradually introducing a general ban on waste landfill at European level and for the phasing-out, by the end of this decade, of incineration of recyclable and compostable waste; this should be accompanied by appropriate transition measures including the further development of common standards based on life-cycle thinking; calls on the Commission to revise the 2020 recycling targets of the Waste Framework Directive; is of the opinion that a landfill tax – as has already been introduced by some Member States – could also help achieve the above ends;

http://ukwin.org.uk/2012/05/17/rotterdam-incinerator-closed-due-to-overcapacity/

172012

As reported in LetsRecycle, Frans Beckers of the Van Gansewinkel Group waste business has stated that the company closed down an incinerator due to overcapacity and advised others to do the same:

We closed one of our incineration plants in the Rotterdam area. There is overcapacity in Germany and we hope some of our colleagues will follow suit. We hope more [incineration] capacity will be taken out of the market. In the end we could harm recycling performance.

Beckers also claimed that these problems also relate to biomass, stating that: “There is a lack of fuels. Too much is being burnt. We need to ensure we do not invest in too many biomass energy installations as we won’t have the fuel any more”.

In the same article Michel Sponar, policy officer with the European Commission’s environment directorate, is also reported as saying that “member states such as Germany and Denmark which are heavily reliant on incineration need to change their focus too, by sending more waste for recycling and composting”.

These comments should be set in the context of the Environment Agency recently granting SITA a permit to export 600,000 tonnes of UK RDF to Amsterdam, a quadrupling of RDF export licenses; calls from the European Commission for the UK to avoid sending recycable material to incineration and the European Parliament’s Committee on the Environment calling for “the phasing-out, by the end of this decade, of incineration of recyclable and compostable waste”.

Incinerator may be on hold, but jaunts to Lion City are a go

SCMP

LAI SEE
Howard Winn
May 25, 2012

Readers will be aware, as we keep going on about it, that progress on the government’s plans for an incinerator on Shek Kwu Chau is on hold. So you would have thought that the Environmental Protection Department (EPD) might like to take the opportunity to reconsider its plans. But not so. Lai See has learned that the government is quietly working behind the scenes to advance this project. Recently, various heads of environmental groups based on the islands have received an unusual invitation from the Hong Kong Islands District Association (HKIDA). Noting that the incinerator is a key issue of concern to island residents, it says the HKIDA is organising a trip to Singapore at the end of the month. The purpose of the trip is to study the Lion City’s approach to waste management. Singapore has been chosen for the excursion because it has four incinerators.

Participants only need to pay HK$1,000, which for four days and three nights in Singapore is not a bad deal. A trip like this would cost at least HK$6,000. There are 50 places available, so let’s assume conservatively it is costing HK$300,000. Who is funding this, you might wonder. Certainly not the HKIDA. The sponsors are the Environment and Conservation Fund (ECF) and Environmental Campaign Committee. These funds are for a wide range of non-profit environmental projects, and for promoting environmental awareness. One member of the ECF funding committee is Professor Jonathan Wong Woon-chung, who is with the department of biology at Baptist University. In the past few years, Wong has been the recipient of funding from the EPD and is periodically wheeled out by the government to promote incineration as a means of dealing with waste. Now there’s a coincidence