RecyclingMonster - An Omaha recycling company wants to turn trash into fuel. Officials from Firstar Fiber plan to open a new pyrolysis plant in Omaha to repurpose hard to recycle materials.
Dale Gubbels, President and CEO of Firstar Fiber, said not everything dropped off in a recycling bin can be remade into something new.
“We have never been able to find a market for the plastic bags that people put in their recycling bins,” Gubbels said
Things like plastic bags, candy wrappers, styrofoam cups and chip bags usually can’t be recycled, so they are sorted out and sent to the landfill.
In 2016 Firstar partnered with the Hefty Energy Bag program to sort out hard to recycle materials and turn them into fuel. Gubbels said Firstar gets about 10 tons of materials from the program each month.
Gubbels said Firstar is currently working with an out of state pyrolysis facility that turns to hard to recycle material into usable fuel, but he would like to bring the operation to Nebraska.
“We hope to have by this time next year a pyrolysis plant right here in the city or in Nebraska,”Gubbels said.
Gubbels said once the plant is open, people won’t be required to do anything extra. Firstar will continue to collect hard to recycle materials tied off in orange Heft Energy Bag from people’s homes. The material will then be shredded and compressed into pellets that will be sent to the pyrolysis plant to be turned into diesel fuel or material to make other plastics.
"The way pyrolysis works is it heats the plastics up in the absence of oxygen. It will turn these into a gas and as that gas cools, the majority of it will turn into this [liquid], which is comparable to diesel,"Gubbels said.
Gubbels didn’t give an estimated date when the new pyrolysis plant would be open. Officials from Firstar Fiber say they are still looking for the best location for the proposed plant.
Since 2016, the Heft Energy Bag program has diverted over 1 million pounds of hard to recycle materials out of the landfill.
Courtesy : fox42kptm.com