Strategic Outlook: What Direction for Waste Collection Technologies?

This episode corresponds to Lesson 4 of our online course.

In this week’s episode, we explore the process of selecting waste collection vehicles and technologies for a city’s collection system – where narrow streets, traffic and noise are some of the key factors to influence the decision making process. Our guest this week is project manager of Waste and Recycling at Copenhagen City in Denmark, Björn Appelqvist, who discusses with us the main challenges for cities for collection services, and the advantages and disadvantages of various types of technologies, with a focus on smaller collection vehicles especially. Björn also gives us an insight into their procurement process – where a lack of industry standards make it difficult to navigate.

Thank you to If You Care for making this episode possible.

If You Care Certified Compostable Bags are made from potato starch from starch potatoes, blended with a fully compostable polymer, and are polyethylene and plasticizer free. Their potatoes are grown for starch only unlike corn which is grown for food. Their potatoes require forty percent less land than corn and no irrigation. For more, visit their website.

Events on our radar this week:

European Biosolids & Organic Resrouces Conferece 2014.

Pollutec 2014.

Save The Planet 2015.

Photo by Chmee2. Some rights reserved.

(more…)

 TRANSCRIPT 

Inner City Challenges for Waste Collection Vehicles 

 

Q: Björn can you start by give us some information on Copenhagen city – the layout of the city; what are the main challenges Copenhagen faces for collecting organic materials, and other kinds of materials as well?

Björn Appelqvist: Copenhagen municipality has about five hundred thousand inhabitants, so it’s a quite small municipality, compared with bigger cities around the world. It’s a very small area, and we have a population density of about six hundred inhabitants per square kilometre, and we have three hundred and fifty thousand workplaces within the city borders. So, despite being quite small in international measures, it very much has inner-city characteristics. And, around ninety percent of our inhabitants live in apartment buildings, or high-rise buildings, and we have about twenty thousand single family houses on top of that.

But altogether the Copenhagen metropolitan area has very much inner city characteristics, with all that that means – traffic congestion, narrow streets, historical buildings, commercial and tourism activities combined with residential areas – so, in that way we have all the challenges that inner city areas have, I would say.

One thing that I think is important to point out is that the Scandinavian waste management model is based on emptying most of the bins from in the backyards of the residential buildings. Our bin men actually go in and collect the bin in the yard. It’s not the landowner putting the bins on the street on collection day, which also means that  the waste management companies that we are contracting do have to walk into most of the properties in Copenhagen. This of course calls for more space for bins within the yards; it calls for good access routes, and also means that the collection holds a little bit longer at each address that would be the case if they should empty from the pavement outside the buildings.

Q: And in relation to the trucks being parked outside for longer, and the collection crews having to bring carts outside – could this create a bit of a noise issue with residents?

BA: Of course a collection truck is noisy in some kind of way, but there are basically three types of noise that can be annoying or disturbing for these citizens. First of all, the noise from moving the bins, from where they are placed in the yards out to the vehicle and back again – the wheels are hitting the pavement and the cobblestones and there is noise from the transportation of the bin. That’s hard, and it’s hard also because when you are in the backyards, you’re closer to people’s bedrooms, and that’s most annoying (laugh).

In addition to this, there’s a noise when you are emptying the bin on the compactor trucks – hitting the back of the truck to get the waste out. And the third source of noise is generally when compacting. So, those three factors are more important, I would say, than just having a truck holding still outside the property. Of course as well, you always have the acceleration and breaking of the truck, but that’s quite small compared to the noise level from the other activities.

 

What Should You Look For In Vehicles?

 

Q: And what then are you looking for in a vehicle? Can you tell me about the specifications and so on?

BA: We have a couple of main targets put up. Copenhagen has an ambitious climate plan for becoming Co2 neutral, so of course the reduction of Co2 emissions are important for Copenhagen. We also look at noise reduction, and we look at NOx and particulate matter emissions. Those are the three environmental factors we’re looking at optimising. On top of that, we’d like to see if we can get as working environmentally friendly vehicles as possible, and it’s very much about getting in and out of the vehicle, and if things can be done to make it easier to work around the vehicle, that’s good as well.

And our last factor is that we want our vehicles as traffic, bicyclists and pedestrian friendly as possible. There are talks – and luckily enough waste collection vehicles aren’t involved here – that there are some incidents of right-turning heavy vehicles and accidents with bicyclists. They are of course incidents that are very grave for the unprotected bicyclist in that situation, so that’s something we want to avoid. So in the basic form, that’s what we’re looking for.

 

Does size matter? Pros and Cons

 

Q: A lot of cities are looking to use new generation vehicles – usually smaller vehicles for organics collection especially – but can you tell us about the type of vehicles you use, and the issues you may have with them?

BA: Yes, so most of our vehicles today are standard sized, two or three axle collection trucks (the larger ones), which works pretty well for collections in the city, I would say. But of course you have congestion problems when entering narrow streets. And what you can have as a problem is, if the street is narrow and you have a lot of parked cars, there actually could be trouble getting in our out of the vehicle because you can’t really open the doors (laugh). Then bus doors that can be seen on some types of vehicles could be useful in some situations. But still if a street is within the norm values, it can be very difficult on narrow streets to collect. And in that case narrow vehicles especially are important.

Q: So smaller vehicles do have advantages here: they can access smaller streets quicker, and can therefore be suitable for increased collection times. Regarding noise reduction – if they are electric vehicles and don’t use compaction, this cuts down on noise. But then, there are some disadvantages to smaller vehicles as well. Can you tell us about these disadvantages?

BA: Of course as you say, a smaller vehicle has the advantage that it can get access to more places than a larger one, and you can have noise reduction and so on, but the disadvantages are interesting to approach as well, as you say. Of course inner cities are dense, which can make it hard to go in a big vehicle, but on the other hand, in a densely populated city, you fill up a vehicle quite fast because you have a lot of waste producers in a small area. So, smaller vehicles means a lot more transportation time to transit stations. So the amount of collection work you get out of it in comparison to the transportation work is smaller on a smaller vehicle.

And that of course is also connected to what kind of salary levels you have. Scandinavia and western Europe has high salary levels in general, and the more your man-hour costs you have compared to the investment of the vehicle, the more disadvantageous it is to go for smaller vehicles, I would say.

Q: Okay, so essentially the lower payload capacity – or amount of material that can be placed in a vehicle – is a crucial factor here. And labour costs factor in here too if there is an increase of hours needed to collect the material. These are all important to keep in mind when planning a system – the collection routes, the efficiency of the service and the type of technologies, and listeners can connect with Lesson 4 of our online course to learn more about how to plan an efficient collection system in relation to this.  So, in summary, you have to be careful how you plan…

BA: Yeah. And there is another factor for small vehicles here in Copenhagen and Scandinavia. You have to remember that from an international perspective, Scandinavia is a small market for vehicles in general, so I know there’s not that many suppliers of small vehicles on the market, and that’s something we struggle with when looking for alternatives. There’s not an optimal market competition there, and adapting vehicles for our market aren’t that attractive, it seems – especially for the small ones.

 

Procuring Collection Vehicles: Key Things To Look Out For

 

Q: And for other cities who are looking at contracting or procuring vehicles for collection – what, in your opinion, would be the key criteria or things to pay attention to when choosing a collection vehicle for your city?

BA: I would once again say, go for Co2 reduction. If it’s fuel efficiency, if it’s about vehicles improving or helping to support the driver to drive in a fuel efficient way; if it’s going for reduction of  – especially for cities once again – NOx and particulate matter are some of the tolls on human health and some of the main challenges for an inner city environment. All that should be focused on.

With noise reduction, I see very little on noise reduction on compactor trucks right now. You have noise reduction technologies on the driving lorry, but on the equipment you put on for compacting, that hasn’t been very much done. It’s still a noisy steel cupboard, where you empty waste into, and that has to be improved. Of course it depends on how noise sensitive your city is, but if you could have an environmentally friendly, noise free waste collection vehicle, then you can actually collect waste twenty-four seven. You’ll have good capital use, you’ll have less traffic problems and so on. So noise reduction, I see, is directly connected to the capital use efficiency of your vehicle parts. For me that’s a key issue.

And of course, traffic security and working environment are the third ones. Easy access of the vehicles, and good vision all around the vehicle. To be able to spot pedestrians and bicyclists especially, but also in order for the waste collectors to travel safely around their vehicles. That’s the focus point.

 

Influencing Markets Through The Procurement Process

 

Q: The city of Copenhagen does not own its own trucks, but is a contract-driven organisation: you procure the trucks and waste management services for the city. As a procurer, there are certain ways you can influence the type of vehicles on the market, and encourage certain types of technologies over others. Can you tell me about your procurement process, and how you do this yourselves?

BA: Well, we do our procurement processes in a way that we actually make competition for environmentally friendly vehicles. We are right now mandatorily  specifying the use of electricity for waste compacting so that you can have less noise and less waste emissions from the compacting parts of the trucks. We are putting up competition on the fuel for the lorry. Of course, diesel is  awarded on the lowest level, and then there is either natural gas or compressed gas; and on the top level of course, in the long run, we would like to see more fully  electrical vehicles, which we realise needs new business models and leasing contracts – especially within a procurement situation where we procure for five to seven year contracts.

So here the business has to adapt if we are going to be able to absorb the larger capital costs for having a more economically and financially efficient procuring operation period – but that’s the timeframe that sets the criteria for that. But that’s what we’re doing on the Co2 and noise side right now.

We are specifying norms on the visibility and the height from the road up to the floor in the driver cabins of the lorries to ensure both that they are easily accessible for the waste collectors, but also to make it easier to see pedestrians and bicyclists around your truck. So that’s how we try to do it. We say that there are maximum measures that have to be fulfilled for height from the street to the lower level of the front screen, as well as from street-level to the floor of the driver cabin.

That’s the kind of things we try to do as procurers and a contract-driven organisation.

 

Lack of Industry Standards Makes Tendering Tricky

 

Q: Are there any challenges or issues you’ve face during the tendering process, or any issues you’d like to address when it comes to tendering – maybe in relation to specifying vehicles, for example?

BA: In a way, it is hard as a tendering organisation to find out how to do this, because you havet o do your own market screening on certain technologies or producers. And in the long run, what we really would like to see would be industry standards, or industry norms for waste collection vehicles for use in inner cities. It’s much easier for u sto be able to refer to a standard; it’s much easier for our contractors to know what they should ask for; and it’s much easier in the long run – I hope – for the producers of the vehicles to know what’s expected from them. Because that could be really useful, and that’s something that I would urge the vehicle producers to look into, and see if we can get some standards and norms here. Because that would be a great step forward for efficiency and environmentally friendly waste collection in inner cities. 

 

Final Words 

 

Q: One more question before we go: what would you like to see happen in the future with collection vehicles  or how the city uses them? Any final words you’d like to leave with our listeners?

BA: Well, it would be nice to see more inventions; more untraditional thinking in the field of waste collection. What can be done? What kind of different vehicles could be bought, built and utilised within city borders? I said earlier that we don’t have many small vehicles, but on the other hand, is the ”the bigger the better” philosophy – which is very much driven by the idea of capital per usage – is that the right philosophy? Or could we think differently on this? That would be interesting to see – where the innovation and where the new thinking is in that field.

Lessons Learned from San Jose, CA: Building Anaerobic Digestion Facilities for Municipal Organics

This episode corresponds to Lesson 5 and Lesson 7 (coming soon) of our online course.

This week we speak with Jo Zientek, Deputy Director of the Environmental Services Department at the City of San Jose, California, about their new high solids anaerobic digestion/composting and biogas facility. We take a retrospective look at the city’s achievement in order to learn about their experiences, their challenges and successes in the development and operation of the facility. We discuss the permitting process, feedstock contract awards, the advantages of public/private partnerships, and the request for proposal process in order to highlight typical key success factors and pitfalls to expect with such a project.

Thank you to Zero Waste Energy Development Company LLC, and Republic Services for making this episode possible.

In December 2013, Zero Waste Energy Development Company LLC (ZWEDC) opened the first large-scale commercial dry fermentation anaerobic digestion facility in the United States. With the goal of taking organics recovery to the next level, ZWEDC desired not only to compost organics but also to extract its energy value. For more information, visit their website.

Republic Services provides innovative Wet/Dry collection services to all businesses in the City of San José. The Wet/Dry system has nearly tripled the business recycling rate from 25 to over 70 percent since July 2012! All businesses receive wet collection service which includes organics collection such as food waste and food contaminated paper products. Dry waste includes recyclables and everything else. The materials are processed at the Newby Island Resource Recovery Park’s Recyclery. For more information, visit their website.

In the show, we mention two upcoming events that are on our radar this week:

Ecomondo – the 18th International Trade Fair of Material & Energy Recovery and Sustainable Development which takes place 5th and 8th of November.

and

The Venice 2014 5th International Symposium on Energy from Biomass and Waste, between the 17th and 20th of November.

 

(more…)

 TRANSCRIPT

 

History & Project Journey of the Anaerobic Digestion Facility

 

Q: Tell me about the facility in San Jose and how it’s operating at the moment?

Jo Zientek: The facility, which we just commissioned in November 2013, takes the organic waste from our businesses in San Jose. San Jose is a big city; we’re the third largest in California and the tenth largest in the United States, and we have about eight thousand businesses in San Jose. In 2012, we implemented a brand new business recycling program, and all our businesses are required to participate. Prior to that, businesses could select their own hauler and their own recycling service, but we weren’t getting a lot of good recycling out of our business community. So we went to a new system that all businesses are required to participate in, but that new system allowed us to have sufficient feedstock to open two big, high-tech waste processing facilities to process the waste, and one is this zero waste, dry anaerobic digestion facility.

The facility takes organic waste – some is direct hauled from businesses, and others is first processed by another recycling facility, and the organic waste comes out of it. The facility, which is phase-one, can accept about ninety thousand tons a year, and it’s permitted to add two more ninety thousand tons phases for a total of two hundred and seventy thousand tons a year. And we’re working on the owner of the facility on ways we can help jump-start that expansion now.

The facility has sixteen digester tunnels now and each is capable of generating about 1.6 megawatts of energy. The facility is interesting, because there’s a lot of anaerobic digestion facilities in the world – almost all are wet systems, and this facility is unique because it’s dry. We don’t need that much water in, and we don’t need to deal with pumping the water out to make a more usable product. And it’s fully enclosed, so that allows it to be next to highly populated urban  areas, because there are obviously odours associated with anaerobic digestion. Also, in-vessel composting tunnels (after the organic waste is inoculated with the digestate and goes through the twenty-one day process), then the material is moved to composting tunnels to continue curing, and that’s also inside.

So, this initial ninety thousand tons phase is commercial waste, but we are looking at potentially moving residential organics to that facility – a lot of which we’re not collecting now. And then also other jurisdictions in Silicone valley can also bring their material here.

Q: For our audience who’d like to learn more about positioning/choosing this type of technology in the AD sphere, please refer to Lesson 7 of our online course (which will be released soon). And can you talk us through the beginning of the project, in terms of the Request For Proposal process especially: how did you get it off the ground? 

JZ: It was actually a couple of different efforts that came together. It was an opportunistic project, I’m not sure if everything hadn’t come together quite as it did, we would have been able to get this first project off the ground, but certainly subsequent projects and the expansion will be much easier than the first project. But it began at the end of the year 2007 when our Mayor adopted a Green Vision that was the city’s economic development strategy. And certainly several cities in North America and I assume Europe too had a green technology spin to their economic development strategies as we were all grappling with recession and the economic downturn taking place.

But in San Jose, ours was called the Green Vision, and it included some really aggressive goals to reduce water and increase renewable energy, increase energy efficiency, clean vehicles, trees, trails – those kinds of stretch goals to get our city more sustainable by the year 2022, and two of those goals came into play for this project were adopted by our council at the end of 2007 were increasing renewable energy in San Jose, and getting to zero waste. They were the two goals in that ten-goal Green Vision.

So, we immediately had interest from one of our local haulers. The Bay Area is a little unique than other cities because we tend to have a lot of very independent, very creative local recyclers and haulers – not as many large, corporate, multinational haulers that are in other cities in the United States. And one of them said that they were interested in doing a renewable energy park. They wanted to do it on city land, and we have about two-thousand acres in the southern tip of San Francisco Bay that’s been our buffer lands, because we operate a large, regional wastewater treatment facility that serves San Jose and other cities in Silicone Valley, and we were looking at ways – concurrent with this project – that we can dry our biosolids that would help mitigate odour and get the process done faster and liberate some of that land that we’ve been holding as buffer land.

So this proposal that came unsolicited after the Mayor’s Green Vision was adopted, was to use the buffer land for this project and potentially some other renewable energy projects. One challenge we had with this buffer land was that it was on an old, closed landfill that we knew very little about. I joke that the city probably bought it in a bar in the nineteen hundreds, and there wasn’t a lot of history on it, no one knew exactly what was in the landfill. The benefit, though, was the landfill was old so there’d been a lot of settling already done and it hadn’t been used for several decades. The other odd thing about this land is that although it was in the middle of Silicone Valley, it had no utility infrastructure to it. So although it was across the street from our wastewater plant, it had no sewer infrastructure, no power, no water, and no run-off system set up on it.

Q: So you had to start from scratch here…

JZ: Yes. It was almost a green field in the middle of Silicone Valley, and it was a very difficult site to develop just from the issue of the environmental sensitivity, plus it was on a closed landfill. In order to make sure anyone who was interested in looking at that site as projects for the green vision, we actually ended up doing a request for information to open up the opportunity, but we didn’t get any other project interest except this project from one of our current, privately owned recycling haulers.

So that was going on, and we ended up taking their official request for interest, and ended up a due diligent process to see if we could begin this project. And then concurrent to that, we had been planning for several years to do a complete, evolutionary change to our commercial solid waste system. As I’ve mentioned before, anyone could pick their own hauler, but the problem with that is that they could lose a customer in thirty days – the city ordinance allowed them to get out of an existing hauler contract with thirty days notice. And the challenge with that is that haulers can’t finance infrastructure development to recycle without a guaranteed customer base and revenue stream, because as you know these facilities are very expensive.

So, unlike our residential system where we had three big recycling facilities in San Jose set up to serve our residential customers, there was no infrastructure investment to serve our commercial customers in the last twenty years. So we decided to start the process of looking at making the system exclusive. It was a very, very long process; in the state of California, if you make a system or hauling contract exclusive, you have to give all the current haulers a seven year notice. So we did that. We did extensive stakeholder outreach, both with the hauling community and the customers. We had customers from everything from mom and pop restaurants and small service shops to Adobe and EBay and Cisco – so just a huge range of customers here in San Jose.

 

Success in Changing The Waste Hauling System

 

Q: And when you were interviewing all the commercial businesses, what kind of things were you asking?

JZ: We asked how was their existing service; if we were to make the system exclusive, what things did they want to see, what things did they not want to see. And then we also provided some information on how the current system is really inefficient – not only was it not recycling that much, all the haulers that collected from commercial businesses would basically go to every street every day because there was no routing efficiency, so it was creating a lot of issues.

And in some respects (especially for small or medium sized businesses), they really weren’t getting rates that were that inexpensive because there was no efficiencies captured in the system, and the small businesses didn’t really have  as much leverage when it came to bargaining for their rates as larger businesses did. So, it was really small and medium sized probably received the largest benefit. And then the larger businesses – because especially high tech firms, they have such a strong sustainability component and that’s important to their customers.

So we got enough support to move forward, and that was a big step for us, because other cities have tried to go from a non-exclusive to exclusive system for the very same reasons, and had more of a challenge. I think in the pacific north-west, including Portland, as of yet hasn’t been able to convince communities to be willing to give up that kind of decision making power to do an exclusive system.

Q: That’s a shame, but perhaps what happened in San Jose has been a bit of an inspiration or an example.

JZ: Yeah, and it has been. Los Angeles was able to use ours as an example and I think just four months ago was able to get their council to approve a district system. New York City and San Diego is also looking at our system, so we’ve definitely been able to show we can get the high diversion, and I think we’re one of the – if not the highest diverting commercial system in the country right now, because all the waste no longer goes to landfill: it’s either direct hauled to the Zero Waste facility if it’s clean enough, or it goes first to a recycling facility near the Zero Waste facility for pre-processing and then the organic stream goes to Zero Waste.

So, concurrently to that, we developed this whole request for proposals process for our commercial system. Zero Waste was already doing their due diligence on the site to build the facility, which they could use for residential or commercial organics. But they did end up bidding on the project to take commercial waste. So, the opportunity of being able to submit a bid for our commercial organics – as they were looking at doing their du diligence on the side and economics – obviously was a huge lift for the project, because it meant they had the possibility of having a guaranteed feedstock if they were to build the facility. So even though they were happening on parallel tracks, that helped.

So we ended up awarding the collection and non-organics processing contract to republic services, which used to be Allied and VFI. And the organic portion went to Zero Waste (the Zero Waste Energy Development Company), so that gave them the feedstock to build the facility.

 

Developing The Anaerobic Digestion Facility: The City’s Role

 

Q: How did the partnership with San Jose city shape the process, and in what ways did it speed the development of the facility along?

JZ: So to bring that closed landfill site up to being able to be built upon (which was an extremely expensive proposition for Zero Waste), what the city did to help share the risk a little bit (and also benefit from this) is that we gave them credit. I think it’s a thirty year lease with a ten year extension option, and they don’t have to pay rent; they get credit each year against the cost they had to spend just to bring this site up to a developal condition, which is about eleven million dollars. So, bringing the power and the sewer and the water; officially closing the state of California ; doing the storm water run off system…those costs were roughly eleven million dollars, and so they have a rent they have to pay to us, but they get to the eleven million dollars and don’t have to start paying us until that eleven million dollars is paid off.

And we benefitted from that, because we up-sized some of the infrastructure that Zero Waste put in, so if we wanted to do additional development in the area, the city could do that. So, we paid for that differential and that was a benefit – plus, if they ever leave, we get a site that’s much easier to develop that it would have been prior to that.

And the other thing we did, which was very unusual for the city (and I worked on this lease with our economic development department – is that the lease they have to the city means that instead of them just paying us a flat rate, once that eleven million dollars is paid off, Zero Waste is going to pay us four dollars in change for every ton of organics that goes into the facility. And that’s  unique for us: it helps the city organisation have some skin in the game in their success. So, completing that expansion of an addition two ninety-thousand tons means the city has an opportunity to make more money. So it kind of helps get my own organisation managing up and, if you will, have some skin in that game to want Zero Waste to be successful and expand.

Q: Very good approach!

JZ: Yeah, and now, to fund the expansion, California is using some cap-and-trade funds to help AD facilities, and we are looking at that expansion as maybe one of the first projects to use California’s new funding source for these types of projects. And the benefit, obviously, of the Zero Waste project is that it’s shovel-ready, so it makes it hopefully very competitive for this round of state financing because we have the permits, and we have the plans, and it’s very, very difficult to be in that position unless you started four years ago!

So, we’re hoping phase two and phase three are just much simpler projects.

Q: When it comes to financing for the facility itself – it is quite a unique project – was it easier for it to get capital financing at the start due to the secured feedstocks and the partnership with the city?

JZ: That helped. Some of the funding sources, (i.e. the California Pollution Control Financing Authority), I don’t think they’re quite as designed for emerging technology. And because this first phase was so new, I think the partners of the Zero Waste Energy Development Company really had to bring their unique financing relationships that they already had to the table. They were also able to get some Federal money – I think it’s the Department of Treasury 1605 fund tax credit money. But I don’t think they could count on typical financing that’s available for tried and true technology.

Because of their position – they have done a lot of innovative recycling facilities. Another one in San Jose that processes all our waste from our multi-family housing apartments. They were able to leverage some relationships that they already had, but I’m not sure it would be as easy for a company that didn’t have their relationship to start this one. That being said, we built the first on in California, so the second one – now that banks and regulators can tough and feel and hug this one – is going to be infinitely easier than this first one.

So, I think the next one – wherever it is – is just going to be easier and maybe would have an easier time getting access to typical financing vehicles that these companies use.

 

Struggles With Permitting

 

Q: Let’s talk more about the permitting process itself and the city’s role – what was it like, and was there any struggles you faced?

JZ: The onus was on the developers, Zero Waste, to get the two permits, but there were some issues the city had to work through. And the thing that made this project tricky was that it was on a closed landfill in an environmentally sensitive area, so that in and of itself took a long time to resolve. And we had to come up with the monitoring plans; so we have testing wells to make sure there’s no contamination in the groundwater, and the whole site is at sea level next to the sea, so infiltration underground is an issue. So, Zero Waste now does that on behalf of us. And that required a solid waste facility permit from the state.

Because the state had never seen or touched a dry AD facility like this, it was complicated. I think the state ended up subcontracting with a firm on the east coast to evaluate the permit. Some of the designs we got, because it was a German technology, came to us in German and I think they had translating issues. Even the facility now, some of the software that monitors the environment for the microbes still reports in German and  know they have to use Google Translate to translate it! But everything is to keep those microbes happy.

So that was challenging, and there were a lot of questions, and a lot of them had to be answered by the German technology firm and then translated back to English. So that was challenging and that process ended up taking two years to get the permits done. And then the building permit itself, which the city issues…so, the state issues the solid waste permit, and the building permit is issued by the city. But I know we had extensive back and forth which required hands-on meeting with a lot of city officials, Zero Waste, and the contractor to figure out whether those composting cells, where the anaerobic digestion was actually taking place for twenty-one days, had to be fit for human habitation or not, and that had a significant difference on how they were constructed. So that took months and months to work through.

So again, the second facility will just be so much easier than this one. It was a lot of work and a lot of educating everybody on what this was, and what it wasn’t, and it was big effort.

Q: Would you have any words of advice on this whole topic for those our there who are now thinking of starting the next one?

JZ: I think definitely being able to do a demonstration phase. If your permitting agency is just not familiar with it, getting a demonstration project is probably simpler than starting off with a commercial scale facility like we did. It just requires a lot of determination, and getting your organisation, especially your government organisation comfortable with taking thoughtful risk I think is just a shift that you have to make.

You know, we’re working on another demonstration project with a different German technology on biosolids. And the first technology provider went bankrupt so we had to find another one who also ended up being a German company. But getting your organisation comfortable and just that that’s normal – if you’re looking at doing cutting edge things, these companies will go bankrupt, they will take a year or two to permit even a demonstration project. So just make that part of the culture, because that’s just how it is when you try to do new things in this space.

 

Californian Policy: How Can It Help Other Organics Recycling Facilities?

 

Q: In terms on policy, is there anything you would like to see changed or brought in to help make the development and running of similar MSW AD and composting facilities easier?

JZ: Certainly at the regulatory level, getting a unified approach to how to permit these facilities, so each jurisdiction isn’t stuck starting from scratch with each similar facility. So, we had been working with the state of California on a standard EIR process for different organic technology types, like anaerobic digestion, and this is very helpful because it’s just too difficult for cities and jurisdiction’s that want to build these things from scratch.

Getting really clear permitting direction from the regulatory agency including, you know – in California the water and the solid waste aren’t in the same organisation on the state level, but the facility needs permits from both those arms, and getting them to work together and come up with a more uniform approach will help. If it’s known what the path is to get the permits, it’s just easier and more likely that both the private sector partner and the government agency will take the risk. But it’s the unknown – where you don’t know if you’re just going to be spinning for years and years trying to figure out what the permitting path is, it just doesn’t make the risk worth it.

So being able to have a uniform approach for the different types of facilities throughout the state I think would really help mitigate the risk. I think California is trying to do that with anaerobic digestion facilities, and we’ve been part of that process on the state level.

Q: It can be very tricky dealing with all the regulatory bodies and the permitting process of different agencies – we get stuck into this topic in Lesson 5 of our course, and talk about the best strategies you can use to get your project off the ground. So those who might be interested, head on over to the course section of our site and take a look.

 

Words of Advice: Demonstration Projects and Face-To-Face Meetings Essential

 

Q: And we’re running out of time now, so the last section, I’d like to get your words of advice for other cities out there looking into doing something similar – maybe some tips on strategy?

JZ: Yeah, I think it’s very important for the public-private partnerships for to get private sector partners to approach you, is to have some well-publicised successes that show your city is wiling to stick it out and be successful. So even if it’s a demonstration project, just taking that first step on a smaller project and then publicising the success of it, because it’s just such a big investment for a private sector partner, and they want to make sure that you have a track record. So, doing some smaller projects and then getting the word out that you mean business, that you’re in it for the long haul, and you’ve successfully implemented both private sector and granting agencies.

Because a lot of times these projects, including the gasification project that I’m talking about, we actually get funding for that through the state or federal grants, so it just really helps to do some smaller projects and being successful – both marketing yourself to a granting agency and a private sector partner.

We’ve really found it helpful to have on-hand meetings and getting everyone in a room when we discuss the permitting issues. Especially with the new project: a regulatory agency or a staff person in some permitting agency hears one thing, and then maybe comes out with a ruling that was based on a conclusion they decided that wasn’t accurate. Like, this issue we had with having to make the cells where the organic material spent twenty-one days with the microbes fit for human habitation, even though the only time people were in them was to put material in them – and then they sealed them up. And it really helped talking through it – face-to-face talking through, because the conclusions that were instantly or immediately drawn about what it was lead to an extremely difficult permitting hurdle to overcome. So just sitting them down and walking them through it really helped. And it was just a lot of that type of meetings we had to do to walk people through and get them over the conclusions they initially drew, which weren’t accurate.