On January 15th, during a technical workshop that was poorly attended by the public and local media, the Sacramento City Council voted on a proposal that could wind up affecting the citizens of Sacramento for many years to come. The Council voted to table the City’s yearlong effort to replace the costly and environmentally detrimental practice of trucking Sacramento’s non-recyclable municipal solid waste (MSW) over the mountains to a landfill east of Reno, Nevada with a sustainable, less costly and more environmentally friendly waste-to-energy (WTE) approach. Our Sacramento-based company, U.S. Science & Technology, submitted a proposal that was ultimately selected from among 11 responses

In 2007, the City of Sacramento generated an average of 750 tons/day of solid waste. About 348 tons/day (46%) of this was recycled, leaving 402 tons/day to be trucked across the Sierra Nevada mountains and buried in the desert at the Lockwood Regional Landfill in Sparks, Nevada. The City, consistent with its sustainability initiative, has been exploring more environmentally sound alternatives for the unrecycled portion of the waste, including the prospect of converting it into energy and other useful products. On August 24, 2007, the City issued a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) to attract a development partner to build, own, and operate a resource recovery and waste-to-energy facility in

Each night, two dozen diesel trucks are loaded up with Sacramento's trash and sent on a journey to the Lockwood Landfill located in the Nevada desert. The trek is a whopping 282 miles round-trip, which is a huge expense for vehicles that only get five to seven miles per gallon. Wondering if there will ever be an alternative to dumping endless piles of waste in landfills? Recently, Sacramento has been debating whether to jump on the bandwagon. In August 2007, the idea was proposed to create a "waste-to-energy" facility. This got the gears moving, and in February 2008, Sacramento granted exclusive negotiation rights to U.S. Science and Technology. The technology is called Plasma Gasificat