This week the City Council passed a resolution in support of conversion technologies. You might well ask, “What the heck are conversion technologies?” To quote the resolution, they can “minimize landfill disposal, create ‘green collar’ jobs, and utilize waste material in an environmentally beneficial manner.” In other words, they could be a very smart move.
Conversion technologies are a large and varied group of thermal, chemical, and biological processes that can take municipal solid waste—which would otherwise go into a hole in the ground—and turn it into useful products, such as compost, aggregates, or fuels. The product depends on the technology and the type of waste that goes into it. These technologies are in commercial-scale use in places including Japan, Israel, Poland, and Great Britain—but not yet within the U.S.
I’ve been fortunate to work for the past year and a half with a team at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works on an effort to apply these kinds of technology locally. Over several years, the County Supervisors have unanimously supported a deliberate, careful process to identify available conversion technologies and find the ones most likely to work here in Southern California. Driving this process is the fact that the enormous Puente Hills landfill, located south of the 60 freeway in the City of Industry, will close in 2013. By then, the County will need to be ready with other ways to handle trash.
Currently, the County is working to site at least one demonstration facility, and more if possible. The goal is to test different types of conversion technologies on municipal solid waste as it is generated in Southern California. The conversion plants will take only post-recycled, landfill-bound waste—in other words, they won’t divert recyclables. Moreover, they will be located at existing material recovery facilities (also called MRFs) and transfer stations, so that the waste does not need to be trucked to the conversion facility. Candidate sites for these demonstration plants are in Huntington Beach, Perris, and unincorporated Riverside County not far from the City of Riverside.
Why are the candidate sites not in Los Angeles County? In order to demonstrate that the technologies can work here, the County sought MRFs that met a number of criteria, including having permits in good standing and having enough room to accommodate a conversion facility. No candidate sites met the criteria within Los Angeles County. But once the technologies are proven, the next phase is to implement them at various locations within the County. And thanks to the City Council’s resolution, that could include Long Beach.
Long Beach already has a waste-to-energy facility, known as SERRF (Southeast Resource Recovery Facility), located on Terminal Island north of the Port of Long Beach and in operation since 1988. The SERRF generates up to 36 MW of electricity—enough to power more than 36,000 homes—which it sells to Southern California Edison after using what it needs. This is one of only three such facilities in the State of California (another is in Commerce and the other in the northern part of the state).
Conversion technologies, the resolution rightly notes, are the next generation of resource recovery. They are designed to capture as much of the incoming material as possible in the products and create a minimum of residue—and the residues are inert and can be used in building materials or road paving. I’m also very pleased to see that our Council resolution says conversion technologies in our city could help meet growing electric power demand for port sources such as oceangoing vessels (shoreside power), cranes, and even trucks. This is really smart thinking!
For more information on the County’s conversion technology evaluation and demonstration effort, please visit www.socalconversion.org. (The City of Los Angeles is also evaluating new technologies for waste management through its RENEW LA program.)