WCCWC: Seeking Partnerships

In the view of one consulting attorney, an energy-from-waste project can be best served when a public-private partnership is forged from the outset.

At the Waste Conversion Congress West Coast 2011 event, held in December, 2011 in San Jose, Calif., attorney Tal Finney of Dongel Lawrence Finney LLP offered “A Framework for Public/Private Partnerships” in the energy-from-waste sector. Finney is a partner in the Los Angeles-based law firm.

Joining the Congress via teleconference, Finney told attendees that 13 percent of the discarded materials in the United States are going into energy production applications, while 54 percent heads to landfills, which strikes Finney as a troubling circumstance. “The general public has no idea how environmentally damaging [landfills] can be,” he remarked.

In Finney’s view, most energy-from-waste systems provide a better option than continuing the current practice in the United States of landfilling some 3,500 acres per year of waste.

He remarked that such systems can still “promote recycling” and that treating the remaining materials as energy inputs “makes waste a commodity. That’s an exciting thing considering how much waste is generated every day.”

The public-private framework described by Finney has the public agency in the role of obtaining grants and performing legal review work while benefitting by reducing its waste disposal costs and producing energy. The private company involved plays the roles of developing innovative technology and adopting some of the risk while it profits from the sale of licensed technology and equipment and potentially collects the tipping fees.

Finney was optimistic about the progress of such public-private partnerships, telling attendees that “contracts are being signed in several places around the world that previously had not been doing anything” in the energy-from-waste sector. “It’s starting to finally happen, on a very large scale,” Finney stated.

Waste Conversion Congress West Coast 2011, held in December 2011 at the Convention Plaza Hotel in San Jose, Calif., was organized by Eye for Energy.