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

I agree with Dave Winer that anyone can be a journalist today. The problem is that not all voices have equal merit, and a lot of the commentary is simply uninformed or misinformed noise. Consequently, I like the reputation-based credibility systems used by sites like Slashdot. They do a good job of filtering the noise.

Hi, George! I think we agree on the Zero Waste goal. I'm all for the highest-and-best use of atoms; that's a basic tenet for our business. As a friend of mine in the Sierra Club says, "waste is a verb!" However, like many in reputable environmental organizations, I don't think we can really achieve zero waste without implementing some environmentally-responsible conversion technology. I believe we've found that technology. The greenaction report you're citing is rife with errors, mostly in logic and relevance. They make the mistake of assuming that all waste-to-energy technologies and facilities are the same, drawing connections between our proposed facility and other completely different facilities. That's why I wrote the first article in this storyline. If you're a chemical engineer, and you look at what I described, you'll reach the same conclusion as the Sacramento Municipal Air Quality Management District (they reviewed our reference design). In the workshop on January 15, they presented their conclusion: "no toxic emissions, but if you build it larger than a certain size, you'll need to get emissions credits for NOx (smog) and particulate matter". If you're willing to delve into the details, I think you'll find that there really are environmentally-responsible and financially-sound waste-to-energy processes available.

This is a fantastic article... quite poignant. And I'm observing here that it's not being published in the Bee. With respect to journalism and the influence of putting news on a dead tree, I have to disagree. I read everything with a grain of salt... including newspapers like the Bee. One of the things I love about the Economist newspaper out of Britain is that they don't pretend to not have an opinion or a point of view. It's evident in every article, and I'm okay with that. I think it takes a certain humility and sense of integrity to recognize that. I find it interesting also that my favorite newspaper is from Britain! It says something about the world we live in today. Digital communications technologies have broken the local monopoly on news. Every local newspaper today competes with every news source around the world (on the Internet) in every language that the reader speaks/reads. Local news sources should be experts in local news, and they should make that available to anyone who has an interest. I use RSS feeds keyed off of Google News searches for key words that I'm interested in, and these searches turn up interesting stories for me from some of the most obscure places. Example: did you know that the City of Grand Forks, ND is spending $230/ton on their recycling program? I wonder what we're spending? Is it worth it? I like what the Internet is doing for news, but we clearly need a new business model for journalism. Perhaps the Sacramento Press is a step in the right direction?

Greg, thanks for the link to the Sacramento Bee article. You can consider my article here to be a "counterpoint". I'm obviously a little biased, because I'm the Chief Engineer for USST, but I'm also the most informed on the technical details of what we're actually proposing. This article was intended to address a lot of misinformation and speculation that has been circulated in the Bee. Terri Hardy, the Bee reporter, has been covering a very technical subject without ever bothering to talk to me. My paragraph above on baseless comparisons is directed specifically at Bradley Angel and GreenAction. The two commercial plants they referenced used a different technology from a different provider, and the technical differences are very important. The comparison is as unfounded as their comparisons to old incinerators. SMUD is similarly uninformed. The energy efficiency question is a myth. It's not magic; it's chemistry. The analytical report from Juniper Consultancy Services referenced above shows that the plasma torches consume only 2% of the chemical energy coming in with the waste. Also, as reported above, the total plant consumes only 20% of the total electricity produced; 80% is available for sale. We're offering to sell the renewable energy to SMUD, but they need to make a competitive offer; they're not the only power producer we could sell to. SMUD doesn't support our proposal because they have their own proposal. They were one of the eleven parties submitting proposals in response to the RFQ, and theirs was not selected because it didn't meet the City's goals outlined above. In this sense, SMUD is one of our competitors. They have a political advantage over us though; they have an employee (Steve Cohn) on the City Council. For his day job, he's an attorney for SMUD. After recusing himself all year because of his obvious conflict of interest, he declined to do so in the last council meeting (November 6th) and came out fighting. Somehow the Bee seems to have missed that detail in their story. And, yes, USST has reimbursed the City for their travel expenses.

Thanks, Ben. I heartily agree. Can we call this "News Media 2.0"? Political status: with the recent mayoral transition and the holiday season, things are a little quiet right now. City staff are using the time to address questions raised by Council Members in the last City Council meeting. I think we can expect to see it make the agenda again sometime after the holidays.