Too good to be true?

That’s what one Benton County supervisor thought as heard an update on the Fiberight ethanol plant in Blairstown, which was given Tuesday, April 29, at the supervisors’ meeting in Vinton.

Giving the update were Craig Stuart-Paul, CEO of Fiberight, Brian Ryerson, director of business development for Fiberight, and plant manager Danny Viall.

Since this winter, Benton County has been looking at the future of its current landfill south of Blairstown, as post-closure costs were found to be higher than expected.

Stuart-Paul and Fiberight are hoping to work with Benton County by offering to take some of its municipal waste, so it can be converted into ethanol and other products, such as compressed natural gas (CNG).

Fiberight bought the plant three years ago. Since then, they have an approved pathway from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to get an environmental permit. They have engaged with the state to get 95 percent of permits required for the plant. They are also qualified as a recycling facility.

Stuart-Paul said the recycling is important, as they recycle 75 percent of the material that comes into their plant.

On the financial side, they have applied and received a $25 million loan guarantee from the USDA – one of only three given last year. To get that guarantee, they had to prove the technology they are proposing actually works. So, $7 million was spent in Fiberight’s Virginia facility. They also have $25 million in equity financing, allowing them to proceed with the project.

“We weren’t really ready to go until all of the money was committed,” Stuart-Paul told the board. “Now all of the money is committed, so we’re going to invest somewhere north of $50 million in Benton County.”

He hopes to have construction start towards the end of this year.

In an email to this newspaper, Stuart-Paul added they are planning on timing and managing truck freight to avoid having to go through Blairstown.

Spokes

To get the raw material, Stuart-Paul explained they are building a spoke location in Marion, rather than having trash trucks driving through Blairstown. Trash is dumped at the spoke facility in Marion. Some materials are removed, so what’s left is the organic part of the waste stream. That is trucked directly to the plant in Blairstown. The truck is unloaded onto a conveyor belt, and moved to pulper where it is sterilized and deodorized.

They also voluntarily are putting up a bond, so if for any reason they close down, there will be bonding in place to clean it up.

They have a letter of intent with the town of Marion to build the supply facility. Marion officials have visited the facility in Virginia to see how the process works. Iowa City has also sent a delegation to Virginia. They are working to build a similar spoke facility at the landfill in Iowa City.

“At some point we will be quite happy to present the full design of the facility,” Stuart-Paul said, with a 3-D walk-through, to show what they are doing to prevent “fugitive emissions” such as odor. He wants to engage the board and community in the design process. They plan several meetings with the Blairstown community, and they invited the supervisors to attend.

Stuart-Paul wanted to make the facility available to Benton County, if they wanted, at the most favorable rates.

Supervisor Terry Hertle asked how many tons of garbage went into the county landfill each day. Benton County Engineer estimated it at 50 tons. Stuart-Paul expects 350 tons a day at the Fiberight facility.

At 20 tons per truck, it was estimated there would be 17 truckloads a day.

Referring to Benton County, Stuart-Paul said he knew the landfill situation was “constantly fluid,” adding, “We are building a facility right there. If there is an extent we can help Benton County in doing so, we are all open to discussion.”

One option is building a transfer station spoke at the Benton County Landfill.

When asked about the natural gas used to run the facility, Stuart-Paul said it would use its own gas through its digester.

Working together

Stuart-Paul said Viall will meet with the current landfill study committee.

As for working with Benton County, Stuart-Paul said he’s not going to do it to lose money. What they will do is offer the best price. Other factors are the value of ethanol and plastic. If those markets improve, there could be a rebate.

“All I’m saying to you is we’re here. We’ll find a way to make it work,” Stuart-Paul told the supervisors.

“What kind of odor would escape your facility?” asked Benton County Attorney David Thompson.

“You can come down to our plant in Virginia and walk around it,” Stuart-Paul said. Both Marion and Iowa City officials both noted it was not odorous. A scrubbing process takes care of this.

As for Blairstown, he said, “I can guarantee you won’t smell anything relative to the 11,000 head of cattle that surround the property,” Stuart-Paul observed.

When asked about water usage, Stuart-Paul explained 20 percent of the waste coming in is water. The water coming out of the process is clear, though there will be a minimal contract with Blairstown for water.

This is all part of the engineering they want to show the public. “We’ve spent – to date – $21 million in developing this technology platform.”

“Anything that sounds too good to be true, you kind of wonder about it,” said board member Don Frese.

Stuart-Paul responded, “That’s why we built the demonstration plant. Come to look and see, touch and feel. The biggest thing is we’re putting OUR money into it … we’re not asking you for anything at all … so if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. No harm, no foul to you. It’s the nature of the business. You put your players on the field and make a measured investment.”

Thompson asked of the worst-case scenario of losing money and the plant goes out of business. Would they have enough to clean it up? Stuart-Paul said that is covered in the bond.

“The worst turning to worst,” Thompson observed, “would be ‘Rosebar the Sequel,’” referring to the business that recycled tires in Vinton several years ago.

Perhaps you remember the scene from Back to The Future, where Doc fills the DeLorean time machine up with garbage to create fuel, then goes whizzing down the street? While we haven’t mastered time travel, fuel made of garbage is becoming a reality.

Every week, the garbage truck collects your trash and carries it away to a landfill. Imagine if the driver took a different path and carried the waste to a refinery, to be turned into fuel that powers our cars, trucks and buses. This is not science fiction – it is happening today, in Lawrenceville.

That’s where Fiberight, an advanced biofuels company, has built a waste-to-fuel plant. The company will open a second facility in Iowa next year. It is among a number of companies breaking ground, building and operating advanced biofuel plants all over the country – bringing these cutting-edge technologies to commercial scale and producing jobs.

As the CEO of Fiberight and a scientific expert on renewable energy, we believe expanding the production of clean, domestic biofuels will create jobs in Virginia and help cut our oil use.

The potential is huge. About half of the waste we produce – not counting recyclables – can be turned into fuel. Companies like Fiberight have developed innovative methods to transform waste into advanced biofuels from fiber, and biogas from food and other waste (even diapers). In Virginia alone, there is enough municipal waste to create more than 400 million gallons of advanced biofuel each year. That’s enough to fuel almost half a million cars.

These next-generation biofuels, combined with oil-saving technologies like more efficient conventional vehicles and electric cars, can cut our projected oil use in half over the next 20 years and avoid the problems oil causes for our economy, environment, national security and climate.

The federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is the single most important policy for biofuels, moving the nation toward the goals of energy security, fuel diversity and economic opportunity. It calls for increasing the use of biofuels, which will reduce oil use and provide incentives for the development of new technologies like those at work in Fiberight’s Lawrenceville plant.

According to recent analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists, by 2030 the United States can annually and sustainably “harvest” enough agricultural waste, grasses and household trash to produce more than 54 billion gallons of ethanol (more than three times as much biofuel as the United States produced from corn in 2011).

When you add these other so-called “biomass” resources to the municipal waste available here in Virginia, we have the potential to produce the fuel needed to power 1.5 million vehicles.

Thanks to our commitment to American innovation and the RFS, today we are well-positioned to maximize the potential of these homegrown fuels. Domestic, renewable transportation fuel has strengthened America’s rural economies and communities, and making the transition to biomass-based fuels will take these opportunities to even more communities around the nation. It has also spurred billions of dollars of U.S. investment in new technology for advanced renewable fuel.

Renewable fuel and the RFS are driving economic growth and job creation across the country. We cannot put those jobs at risk. According to a recent report from Bio-era, the RFS advanced biofuels program would directly create 190,000 jobs. Total job creation could reach 800,000 jobs in all 50 states when the program is fully implemented.

These are jobs across the U.S. economy that include equipment manufacturers, farmers, transportation companies, rural co-ops, clean tech innovators, chemical engineers and construction firms.

Congress should maintain critical policies – like the RFS – and extend tax incentives for cellulosic biofuels that expire at the end of the year. Consistent policies will help ensure cellulosic biofuels made from wastes and other resources become a key part of America’s secure energy future.

What is this stuff we call waste?

We all add to the waste stream every day – probably without thinking much about it. According to Webster, waste is “damaged, defective, or superfluous material,” also considered, “an unwanted by-product,” or refuse, which is defined as “a worthless or useless part of something.” In other words, it is something that was created that no longer has any use for anyone. In a given day an individual’s waste stream might include packaging from a new purchase, discarded coffee cups, take-out food containers or used up toothpaste tubes – just to name a few once-valuable items that become waste every day.

So if we have a waste problem, which we do, (Americans generate some 200 million tons of waste per year) it appears that there are two ways to address it. First, stop creating the waste in the first place, or, second, find a way to to turn that waste back into something useful. In other words, turn it into a raw material for some other process.

Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry, explains that nature merges waste and raw materials – fallen leaves turn into fertilizer for new saplings in the forest, for example. Benyus calls this “waste equals food.” If we are to become sustainable, she suggests we need to follow nature’s lead.

I don’t expect we’ll ever find ourselves eating municipal waste, but since we also have an energy problem, converting that waste into energy would certainly be the next best thing. Besides, what is food after all, if not a source of energy?

Waste-to-energy is already happening today and there are many technologies to make the process cleaner and more efficient. Let’s have a look.

1) Waste incineration

The simplest approach is to just burn the stuff directly. These basic incinerators are in operation in over 1000 plants around the world, mostly in Europe and Asia. After some presorting, the municipal solid waste (MSW) is dumped into a bunker where it is burned. The heat is used to create steam, which generates electricity, and the exhaust is processed by an extensive air pollution control system (here’s a video).

Many waste items contain mixed materials (e.g. metal and plastic), which are difficult to separate and can’t be economically recycled. So the only disposal options for these items are incineration or landfill. At least with incineration, some value is extracted in the form of energy. However, there are questions about the resulting emissions from incineration plants. Greenpeace and other groups have long fought these plants, raising concerns over heavy metals, as well as dioxin and furans, and new pollutants formed during the incineration process. They also give off CO2 and other greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change – so emissions capture systems must be very robust.

Waste incineration also produces a waste product of its own – ash – which must be treated as hazardous waste. However, as the capture technology improves, these risks are being mitigated and managed. In super-green Denmark, incineration plants are very popular and effective – only 4 percent of all trash ends up in landfills, compared with 54 percent in the U.S.

Should waste incineration be considered a renewable energy source? While the generation of MSW seems endless, incineration is first and foremost an attempt to manage the waste problem and reduce landfills, rather than a truly renewable fuel, since it does create some waste of its own. And while these plants produce cheap energy and reduce the volume of waste sent to landfills, both good things, ultimately it would be better for society to produce less trash in the first place.

2) Landfill gas

There are low carbon alternatives to waste incineration. The first is relatively common landfill gas collection. As organic matter in landfills decomposes, it gives off several gases, primarily methane. Methane is the principal component of natural gas. It is also a potent greenhouse gas, twenty times stronger than CO2. When this gas is collected it can be used as a power source, rather than a contribution to global warming.

When methane is burned to generate electricity, the byproduct is CO2. Although CO2 has global warming impacts of its own, the conversion is actually much better than you might think. First of all, CO2 is preferable to methane because of its lower heat-trapping effect. Beyond that, if the volume of trash in the landfill is similar to the volume of food and other products that are being grown above ground (capturing carbon as they grow), the process can essentially be considered carbon neutral.

Some landfill gas projects simply siphon off the methane, others heat the waste in a pyrolysis process giving rise to syngas. This process can spin off useful byproducts and does not produce the hazardous waste associated with incinerator ash. North Carolina’s ReVenture Park is an example of such a project. One problem facing landfill gas projects right now is that natural gas prices are at historic lows which make the financial return on investment much less attractive than it was a few years back.

3) Waste to ethanol

So far, all of these waste-to-energy concepts have led to electric generation. But there are lots of ways to make electricity renewably. What about liquid fuels to power transportation? Waste can provide an alternative to gasoline, diesel fuel and biofuels.
Zero Waste waste to energy waste to ethanol waste incineration The Future of Biofuels: Novozymes syngas ReVenture Park recycling Novozymes municipal solid waste methane landfill gas Janine Benyus Greenpeace furans Fiberight dioxin Craig Stuart Paul compressed natural gas cng cellusloisc ethanol biofuels

But wait, couldn’t waste be a biofuel? Well, it turns out that municipal solid waste contains roughly 18 percent food and 40 percent organic matter. So maybe that’s not such a crazy idea. Craig Stuart-Paul, CEO of Fiberight, located in Catonsville, Maryland, certainly doesn’t think so. Several years back they developed a method to separate organic from inorganic waste. Working with Novozymes, they came up with a way to break down organic pulp from packaging materials such as cardboard into cellulosic ethanol. Considering that cardboard will sit untouched in a landfill for many years without breaking down, the fact that Fiberight can convert it into cellulosic ethanol in just a few days is quite impressive.

Once they receive the municipal waste, they separate the organic from the inorganic waste. Then they remove the recyclables. Finally, they extract the organic pulp from the liquid. The liquid is used to produce compressed natural gas (CNG), which many garbage trucks are beginning to use as fuel. This means the trucks can fuel up when they come to dump the trash. In the future, the CNG will also be used to power the plant itself. But the real novelty is in the final step where the remaining pulp is converted, using their proprietary process, into cellulosic ethanol. All told, 80 to 85 percent of everything that comes in is put to some use and thus avoids the landfill. The process is quite unique. According to Stuart-Paul, “We can take a [disposable] diaper, strip off the plastic, and recover the cellulose and the poo that’s in it,” converting the one to ethanol and the other to biogas.
Zero Waste waste to energy waste to ethanol waste incineration The Future of Biofuels: Novozymes syngas ReVenture Park recycling Novozymes municipal solid waste methane landfill gas Janine Benyus Greenpeace furans Fiberight dioxin Craig Stuart Paul compressed natural gas cng cellusloisc ethanol biofuels

This is already happening in a “pre-commercial reference plant” in Lawrenceville, Virgina, with an annual capacity of one million gallons of ethanol. This process will move to a full-scale plant in Blairstown, Iowa, next year, which, serving 225,000 people living in the three surrounding communities, can produce 6 million gallons of ethanol plus an additional 4.5 million (diesel equivalent) gallons of CNG.

Suddenly, our municipal material recovery facilities (MRF), which used to handle only recyclables, can begin to handle all waste, in what is called a “dirty MRF,” and our waste stream begins to resemble something that you might expect to find on a forest floor where trash equals food and nothing is wasted.

Fiberight LLC has been on the fast track to commercializing owner Craig Stuart-Paul’s technology for turning trash into biofuel since Stuart-Paul founded the company in 2007. In January, the company landed a $25 million loan guarantee from the USDA to convert a corn ethanol plant in Iowa to a biofuel facility.

In August, Fiberight, which currently employs 20, closed a $13 million round of closed private investor fundraise and just this month opened a demonstration plant in Virginia.

“It’s a very different animal than a chemical plant. We convert organics to biomass pulp that contains everything from food waste to used diapers, packaging waste — the organic part of garbage,” Stuart-Paul said.

The method entails collecting garbage, separating the usable organic parts, breaking it down to a pulp and deodorizing it, then processing it into fuel.

Maryland is an ideal location for the business because his method for creating fuel works best among high-density populations that can produce a lot of garbage.

“What you have is a lot of trash in the Maryland-D.C. area,” Stuart-Paul said.

The area also has a lot of traffic, which could mean a lot of potential customers — if they park on the Beltway for long enough. The fuel could also be used to power the garbage trucks serving the plants.

The four sites in Maryland and possibly Virginia would be the starting points for the process and the pulp created there would be sent on to a central plant to be turned into biofuel. He hopes to open them by the end of 2013.

Stuart-Paul is also finalizing a deal with a strategic partner to help pay for those plants. Said company would also provide technical support and access to corporate lawyers and public relations experts. He declined to identify the potential partner aside from saying it is a multinational company, and said he expects to announce the agreement in about two months.

Fiberight is among the growing businesses contributing to the rise of the clean-energy technology industry in Maryland, a state where other technology industries such as biotech and cyber security have already taken hold. Several biofuel companies call Maryland home, including Baltimore’s Marshall Energy Group LLC, which also produces wind and solar power, and another UMBC incubator company, Clean Green Chesapeake, which makes fuel from algae.

Public awareness of energy efficient and environmentally friendly options for energy and fuel has grown, as solar panels, hybrid cars and other innovations have become more mainstream.

“Clean energy is a sector that is potentially huge,” said Ellen Hemmerly, executive director of the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s research and development arm, bwtech@UMBC. “We think we’re going to see growth, but it’s a slower growth.”

IOWA CITY (CBS2/FOX28) – It’s like clockwork every day, all day long at the Iowa City Landfill: the trash comes in and never comes back out. Trucks leave the garbage to decompose in the Earth indefinitely.

Most give little thought to the process or what’s being thrown out, but one company is giving it a lot of thought, and now they believe your trash could be someone else’s…fuel.

“This is an approved plan for taking municipal solid wastes and converting them into bio fuels,” said Steve Gerber, Vice President of Fiberight Industries, as he presented their Environmental Protection Agency approval to the Iowa City City Council Tuesday night (8/22).

Fiberight is a company from Maryland that’s slowly expanding out into Iowa. First and foremost, they say they have plans to build a $59.9 million dollar biorefinary plant in Blairstown, but they also have interest in Iowa City, and more so, Iowa City’s trash.

“Our process recovers your garbage, and we take that and from the organics we extract sugars and from that we can create ethanol,” said Gerber.

Gerber says more than 50% of everything that goes into a landfill is organic material; organic material with the capacity to become ethanol.

So, his company wants to work with the city to turn their trashed organics into the next-gen fuel. They’re asking the City Council to lease 3 acres of landfill for them to use the incoming trash at their Blairstown plant.

The trash is money for the company, but they say there are serious benefits for the city as well. Along with pulling out organics, the company also sifts out recyclables and methane gas; both of which can go back to the community for other purposes.

In the end, they estimate the project would reduce trash coming into the landfill by about 80% and drastically extend the life of the property. Plus, Gerber told the council the plan would immediately create 15 to 20 jobs in the city.

“It sounds potentially very exciting to me,” said Councilman Jim Throgmorton on Tuesday night.

The plan is still in its infancy as far as Iowa City is concerned. At this point the Council is just hearing about it and, while they say they’re interested, they need a lot more information before any formal partnership comes together.

Still, both sides say it’s an exciting opportunity to be at the forefront of technology and environmentalism that was once only dreamt of.

“The US disposes of 175 million tons of municipal solid waste per year, that’s the equivalent for us, that would be 30 billion gallons of ethanol,” said Gerber.

As much as we may want to recycle, our trash bins fill with dirty paper towels, pizza boxes, fabric bits and apple cores, helping account for the 165 million tons of non-recycled garbage Americans produced last year.

A Triangle-based company has now come up with a way to turn that trash into treasure. Well, fuel.

The secret is using enzymes. Novozymes, a company with its North American headquarters in Franklinton, develops and supplies enzymes – biological molecules that speed up chemical reactions. Some of Novozymes products remove stains, some keep bread from going stale.

Now scientists at the North Carolina lab have developed enzyme technology that can convert trash into ethanol. They have partnered with Fiberight, a biofuels company in Baltimore, to demonstrate the concept at an industrial scale.

Fiberight has built a plant in Lawrenceville, Va., north of Lake Gaston, and expects to be in full production in the fall.

“It’s a cool and intriguing idea,” said Armindo Gaspar, the Novozymes scientist in charge of the collaboration. “The (municipal solid waste) industry hadn’t thought about using biotech.”

The United States used 134 billion gallons of gasoline in 2011. Fiberight claims that processing all of the garbage in the U.S. using enzyme technology would produce 10 billion gallons of biofuel per year.

When trash arrives at the Fiberight plant, the company will separate out the glass, metal and plastic, reselling and recycling what it can. The rest of the solid waste is paper, textiles and bits of plant material, which will be turned into a pulp. This “biopulp” is about half of the total waste received.

The biopulp is then digested, meaning the cellulose that makes up the fibers in the pulp is broken down. A cellulose molecule is a long chain, hundreds to thousands of links long. Each link is a glucose molecule, which if freed, can be converted into ethanol. The goal is to break the chain apart. This violent task requires a gang of enzymes.

Humans don’t produce enzymes capable of doing this. That’s why cellulose is considered roughage to us, a key component of dietary fiber. To break down cellulose, enzymes must be stolen from other organisms, such as wood-eating fungi. Novozymes has developed a special cocktail of enzymes that do the job efficiently.

Once the glucose is free, it can be fermented into ethanol. At this stage, it’s no different from turning grapes into wine: add some yeast, and the sugar turns into alcohol.

The Virginia location is only a test site, with a peak production rate of 1 million gallons per year. But the testing is expected to go well. Fiberight already has a commercial plant under construction in Iowa, and expects to add many more in the next decade.

“The days of waste ending in a landfill are gone,” Craig Stuart-Paul, CEO of Fiberight, said in a statement. “We’re giving trash a new beginning.”

Fiberight has announced it has received key federal approval for its production process. The company, who has enlisted Novozymes as a partner, has developed technology to convert non-recycled municipal solid and industrial wastes into advanced biofuels. To achieve federal approval, the company proved its ability to separate recyclable paper, cardboard, plastics, rubber, textiles, metals and glass wastes from organic materials such as food waste.

“The days of waste ending in a landfill are gone,” said Craig Stuart-Paul, Fiberight Chief Executive Officer. “We are giving trash a new beginning – firing our plant and fueling cars and trucks – and providing a less expensive, domestically-made energy source for the country.”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is looking to Fiberight to be one of the first cellulosic biofuels producers to begin producing fuel at commercial scale. According to a company statement, Fiberight is nearing commercialization of advanced biofuels, spurred by the mandates required by the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2).

The company’s first plant online will be in Lawrenceville, Virginia in which $20 million has been invested. Once running at full production, the facility will produce nearly 1 million gallons per year. The plant is currently focused on putting the enzymes to work to break down the trash.

The next step is to bring a larger-scale commercial facility online in Blairstown, Iowa with a target date of 2013. The Blairstown facility will have capacity to produce six million gallons per year.

Lawrenceville, VA—Advanced biofuels from household trash are a critical step closer to consumer gas tanks after Fiberight, a Novozymes partner, announced Aug. 2 a key federal approval for its production process.

Fiberight has developed cutting-edge technology to convert millions of tons of non-recycled municipal solid and industrial wastes into advanced biofuels for cars and trucks.

“The days of waste ending in a landfill are gone,” said Craig Stuart-Paul, Fiberight Chief Executive Officer.

“We are giving trash a new beginning – firing our plant and fueling cars and trucks – and providing a less expensive, domestically-made energy source for the country.”

In its plan, Fiberight demonstrated its ability to separate recyclable paper, cardboard, plastics, rubber, textiles, metals and glass wastes from organic materials such as food waste.

The company is one of the first U.S.-based companies to successfully produce biofuel from waste on an industrial scale.

Renewable Fuel Standard: Generating private investment, long-term careers

Established in 2005 and amended in 2007, the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) requires that new fuel production technologies meet certain regulations as overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act.

Thanks in part to stable policy like the RFS, companies like Fiberight are nearing commercialization for advanced biofuels.

Fiberight is investing $20 million in its Lawrenceville, VA plant.

The plant will generate 100 construction jobs and 55 long-term careers.

The Lawrenceville facility is expected to produce up to one million gallons per year at full production.

Once Fiberight begins producing fuel at its Lawrenceville facility, it will focus on bringing a larger-scale commercial facility online in Blairstown, Iowa with a target date of 2013.

The Blairstown facility will have capacity to produce six million gallons per year.

The next milestone for Lawrenceville is to run the trash through the process and put the enzymes to work.

Novozymes, the world’s leading provider of enzymes to the biofuels industry, has collaborated closely with Fiberight to streamline the production process and will supply enzymes for the plant.

This major step should happen in the next few months.

The United State’s potential production capacity of advanced biofuels from municipal solid waste is estimated at 10 million gallons per year if all 170 million tons of waste was recycled through a process such as Fiberight’s.

For more information, call 919-218-4501.

Fiberight has retained Source Capital Group Inc. of Westport, Conn., to complete a financing led by Venture Cross Partners of Great Falls, Va. to provide expansion capital for the Blairstown biorefinery. Following a total $24 million investment, the facility will be scaled to final commercial production capacity of approximately 6 MMgy in 2011.

Fiberight has developed a core extraction and processing technology to unlock the potential for 9 billion gallons of renewable biofuel contained in 103 million tons of non-recyclable MSW generated each year in the U.S. Fiberight efficiently fractionates waste and uses a highly cost effective biochemical process to turn the organic element of MSW such as contaminated paper, food wastes and other discards into fuel grade cellulosic ethanol. The company has also developed technologies to capture value from the inorganic fraction of solid waste and can recycle many materials that are otherwise discarded. Fiberight’s core wet pulping technology was recently approved after a three year application process by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in a Notice of Allowance on April 23, 2010.

The Blairstown facility will use initial feedstock from paper pulp wastes from a paper plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, followed by integration of other industrial wastes and processed MSW from Fiberight’s operations in Lawrenceville, Va. By mid-summer, operations are projected to begin use of MSW from the Benton County municipality and other Iowa landfills. At targeted full production, the Blairstown plant will be processing over 350 tons of wastes per day into valuable biofuel, at a cost of less than $1.65 per gallon.

Fiberight’s Blairstown biorefinery involves key strategic partnerships with a number of leading companies including Novozymes and TMO Renewables of the United Kingdom. Fiberight’s facilities operate at low temperatures in a closed-loop system resulting in very low levels of emissions or effluents. Fiberight’s highly effective, low capital cost process has distinct competitive advantages over other waste to energy methods as it can capture a significantly higher value from MSW while avoiding emissions created from incineration or gasification.

“Fiberight’s production of cellulosic ethanol from commercial and industrial waste materials will make Iowa a recognized leader in innovative alternative energy production,” said Craig Stuart-Paul, CEO of Fiberight. “Our biorefineries will not only provide local employment opportunities but will take former excess wastes and convert them into high-value cellulosic ethanol. While others have tried to convert MSW into electricity or fuels using more expensive technology and much higher capital investment, Fiberight is the first in the country to successfully achieve high conversions of trash using the a sugar platform technology — offering compelling economics and forward flexibility with the range of biochemical or biofuel products that can be produced. This will be a game-changing disruptive technology for the US as Fiberight deploys its core processes in future communities, as it can build its smaller size facilities on an attractive economic basis with lower feedstock volumes of only 375 to 500 tons per day. Fiberight currently sees market expansion opportunities in over 250 locations in the US that have populations in excess of 150,000 and either high waste disposal costs or landfill capacity challenges.”