Teru Talk News

Teru Talk Newsletter

Volume VI, Issue 6, February 8, 2016 
Teru Talk by Michael Theroux (pronounced "Terú")  

Teru's Trash Talk

Let’s allow ourselves to peer down this Circular Economy pathway, and explore the hands-on business of waste management, conversion, resource recovery, and return of reclaimed materials to the global flow of materials. And let’s look down this road through a ‘digital business’ lens.

We’ve got big landfills and heavy trucks, behemoth pick-apart stations, and every manner of technical platform to take discarded goods down to their fundamental bits and pieces. Now we need to identify, investigate, open, and develop pathways that enable direct digital access globally to resource recovery. This impacts every link in the now-circular Value Chain: collection, separation, pre-treatment, conversion, remanufacturing, and goods-distribution of waste-sourced resources that have been turned back into commodities.

We are witnessing an across the board shift from physical to digital, away from bricks-and-mortar infrastructure and toward on-line networking. Every aspect of our lives and livelihoods are now making this shift, willingly or not.

Moving stuff is governed to a degree by weight and distance. There is a paradox between local vs. global resource recovery, and the key linkage between these two ends of the commerce spectrum is Transport. The immediacy of the digitally-driven circular economy requires that no matter what the physical material needing transit from buyer to seller, there must be a ready method of secure transport. Not to be left out, the waste-sourced resource recovery linkage must also return the used goods to the materials flow and close that gap in the circle, and that transport also needs to be both immediate and secure. Trash trucks only go so far, and certainly not far enough: food waste is a good example. Whatever the resource material, transport distance to a reprocessing hub becomes the limiting factor.

The old transport model of trucks, trains, planes, and boats needs to be revisited and updated. Are Drones going to be the answer to the distance/impact dilemma? Or possibly, will it be the ‘autonomous vehicle’ expansion that would lower or eliminate the cost of human drivers? Growing pieces, but none will be The Answer. Rather, it is the overall low-energy usage / zero-emissions transit surge that will facilitate closing this gap. Yet once again this level of interconnected remote management must be Big Data internet / cloud enabled. Just over that horizon is the need for massive-scale proprietary bandwidth. Front and center: zero-impact transit mechanisms managed by video enabled big-data information management.

We must constantly re-define what the buzz-words mean in our own business endeavors: ‘Corporate Responsibility’, ‘Sustainability’ and for that matter, ‘Circular Economy’. The answers to these questions then inform and constantly modify our business approaches to each discrete yet overlapping emerging market.

Hey Rube!

The California Air Resource Board is looking for live bodies to participate in planning work groups to chart out where the state’s Low Carbon Transportation Investment and Air Quality Improvement Program money will go next year. Step up, dig in, and see if we can steer some of those buckets toward proving out the air quality benefits of waste-sourced resource recovery.

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This Week's Top Story

BDI's Spent-Grain-Fermentation Plant in Göss Produces First Green Electricity

Austria company BDI – BioEnergy International AG (BDI) has announced that an important milestone has been reached during commissioning of the spent-grain-fermentation plant on the grounds of Heineken's Göss Brewery in Göss/Leoben, Styria, Austria. 02/05/2016

The Week's News

Machinex Is Distributor for Krysteline Glass Recycling Equipment in N America

Canadian company Machinex Industries Inc has announced its alliance with Krysteline Technologies for the introduction of Krysteline's unique glass Implosion technology and associated equipment within the North American marketplace. 02/05/2016

XFuels Begins Development of Combined Carbon/Hydrogen Fuel Cell System

Oregon based XFuels Inc has announced that it will begin development on a combined hydrogen and carbon fuel cell using both XFuels' hydrogen capture technology and its non-thermal plasma reforming technology with Converde Inc.'s Carbon fuel project. 02/05/2016

McKnight Grant Expands EESI’s Clean Energy Project in Iowa and Minnesota

The Energy and Environmental Study Institute (EESI) of Washington D.C. has announced receipt of a two-year $150,000 grant from the Minnesota-based McKnight Foundation. 02/04/2016

Renewable Energy Group to Acquire Sanimax Biodiesel Plant in Wisconsin

Renewable Energy Group, Inc (REG) has announced that it has signed an asset purchase agreement with Sanimax Energy, LLC to acquire Sanimax’s 20 million gallon nameplate capacity biodiesel refinery located in DeForest, Wisconsin. 02/03/2016

Tripartisan Biomass Amendment Adopted Unanimously by US Senate

A tripartisan biomass amendment, authored by US Senator Susan Collins (R-ME)   and cosponsored by Senator Angus King (I-ME), has been adopted unanimously as part of the Energy Policy Modernization Act, which is currently under consideration in the Senate. 02/03/2016

CEC Awards $33M to CalCEF Ventures to Develop SEED Initiative

The California Energy Commission (CEC) has posted a Notice of Proposed Award (NPOA), selecting California Clean Energy Fund dba CalCEF Ventures from submissions to the agency's Request for Proposals RFP-15-305 issued last September. 02/03/2016

Calysta Completes $30M Financing to Commercialize FeedKind™ Protein

California based Calysta, Inc has announced closure on a $30 million Series C round of financing, including new investors Cargill and the Municipal Employee Retirement System (MERS) of Michigan. 02/02/2016

Blume Partners with Aufrecht to Expand Waste-to-Liquid Fuel Solutions

California company Blume Distillation, LLC has announced completion of a Strategic Development Agreement (SDA) with Alabama based Aufrecht Technologies. 02/02/2016

Anellotech Breaks Ground on TCat-8™ Facility in Silsbee, Texas

New York based Anellotech, Inc, a sustainable technology company focused on producing cost-competitive renewable chemicals from non-food biomass, has announced that the Company has broken ground on the installation of its fully-integrated development and testing facility (TCat-8™). 02/01/2016

Covanta’s Durham York Energy Centre Commences Commercial Operation

Covanta , a leader in sustainable waste and energy solutions, has commenced commercial operation of the Durham York Energy Centre (DYEC). 02/01/2016

 

CARB Seeks Public Work Group Participants to Develop Funding Plan

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has issued a request for participation in topical work groups focused on informing aspects of the 2016-2017 Funding Plan for the Low Carbon Transportation Investments and the Air Quality Improvement Program (AQIP). 02/01/2016

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Recommended Reading:

 CHAGALL: The Recycling Dragon
CHAGALL: The Recycling Dragon
by Marty Strauss

Out of the Wasteland: Stories from the Environmental Frontier by Paul Relis  
Out of the Wasteland: Stories from the Environmental Frontier by Paul Relis

 

© Copyright 2016 Teru Talk by JDMT, Inc. All rights reserved.

Teru Talk is an online publication of JDMT, Inc with the goal of opening the dialogue and providing current news and commentary on issues and successes associated with waste conversion to renewable energy, biofuels and other bio-based products for resource recovery.

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