Organics

Anaergia Inc., Burlington, Ontario, has announced an agreement to construct a waste organics facility at the Sun Valley Recycling Park owned by Houston-based Waste Management (WM) in Sun Valley, California. This project is designed to recover food waste from LA’s municipal solid waste (MSW) stream.

Anaergia will build a turnkey solid waste processing line at Sun Valley. This processing line will feature Anaergia’s patented Organics Extrusion Press (OREX), designed to recover organics from contaminated MSW through high-pressure extrusion. The OREX line will be used to extract up to 300 tons per day of organic waste from the LA MSW stream. The Sun Valley facility is expected to begin operations in 2019.

The organic waste diverted from the solid waste stream will be processed at Anaergia’s Rialto Bioenergy Facility in Rialto, California. Using Anaergia’s anaerobic digestion technology, the organic waste will be converted into renewable electricity, renewable natural gas and fertilizer. A portion of the renewable natural gas can be used to fuel WM’s compressed natural gas (CNG) trucks.

Anaergia’s Rialto Bioenergy facility will use its high solids wet anaerobic digestion system. The company says this facility is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions up to 220,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year, the equivalent of taking about 47,000 passenger vehicles off the road.

“This technology expands our capability as a leader in organics recycling and sustainability by recovering organics from the waste stream and meeting the current and future organics diversion needs of LA,” Larry Metter, area vice president for WM’s Southern California offices, says.

“Working together with WM is an important step in our company’s mission to recover value from waste streams. The project will introduce leading-edge organics recovery technologies to LA that will enhance recovery of organics, renewable energy and fertilizer,” Andrew Benedek, CEO and chairman of Anaergia Inc., says.