ABINGDON, Va. – As many as 100 jobs and up to $200 million in investment might soon flow into Southwest Virginia or Northeast Tennessee for a facility that reclaims 92 percent of localities’ municipal waste.
The facility would generate ethanol fuel among a host of other products, said Ted Cox, a Bristol businessman who said he’s still negotiating with several localities to determine exactly where the plant could be built.
The owner and president of Reclaimed Resources Inc., Cox has outlined his waste-plant project for leaders in several Mountain Empire counties.
Whatever site is selected, Cox said, “This will be the flagship plant [for this technology] for the whole United States.”
The technology – called a pressure gravity vessel – is explained on the Web site of Ohio-based GeneSyst International, which owns the patent and describes the process as “a new beginning in waste treatment.” The technology promises to more efficiently dispose of trash and waste – by turning it into cellulosic ethanol – and severely curtailing what ends up buried in landfills.
Cox will be licensed by GeneSyst to use the company’s technology.
“Ted [Cox] is as close as anybody about having this done, and he’s really stubborn about nothing’s going to get in his way,” Dave Shriber, cofounder of GeneSyst, said Friday. “He might well build the first one of these in the United States.”
Shriber will be among a group of people from GeneSyst who will be in Virginia on Monday, attending this year’s Energy Technology Summit at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. During the summit, the GeneSyst team will give a presentation on the company’s gravity pressure vessel technology.
Cox said the technology has been used in Europe for many years but is new to the United States; the GeneSyst Web site describes it as “a continuous pressure cooker without any moving parts.”
Cox said the plant he wants to build would have three parts.
First, according to the Web site, municipal waste is put into “a heavy-duty industrial washing machine” and plastic, metal and glass is separated out for recycling.
Next, the remaining waste is chopped, processed and blended with other waste and sludge to be “cooked down in a gravity pressure vessel to make sterile sugars and nutrients.”
In the third step, the resulting mixture is used to produce biofuels, ethanol and methane. Byproducts are clean water and a high-protein feed supplement.
“The big push was in corn ethanol and that really is today passe,” Shriber said, “because all the new tax credits are in cellulosic ethanol.”
The technology has been used in a plant in the Netherlands for 15 years, Shriber said.
According to the company’s Web site, a plant like this is financially self-supporting, avoids the environmental impacts of landfilling or incinerating garbage, has no smokestack and releases no odors.
It would fit on an industrial park site, according to GeneSyst, and is “a major step to a zero-waste community.”
Cox said hopes to select a site for a local plant in the near future.
dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701
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