Recycling companies offer solid waste plans

CIRA de CASTILLOTGI Staff Writer

LIHU’E —Representatives of three trash disposal companies bidding for the

county solid waste contract reviewed their proposals at a public meeting

Monday. All three proposed various recycling technologies.

Earlier

representatives from two other companies bidding for the contract proposed

waste to energy facilities to manage the county’s solid waste.

Groupe

Conporec, HUWS Corporation and Canada Composting have proposed recycling

facilities while Seggersbetter Tecnology and Gay & Robinson are proposing

waste to energy management facilities,

Jeffrey H. Heath, Groupe Conporec

program manager, said that his company uses a recycling process that will

divert 75 percent of Kaua’i’s municipal solid waste from the Kekaha landfill

and produce a high grade commercial compost product for resale.

Heath

said the company is committed to environmental sensitivity and worker safety

and as such the entire process takes place in a closed looped facility and is

odor free.

Conporec’s process begins with a sorting stage that removes all

the non-organic material such as metals and plastics from the waste stream. The

remaining material goes into a patented bio-reactor that process the organic

material into a agricultural organic compost end product.

Conporec is

proposing to build the recycling plant on 10-15 acres of land in the Puhi-Lihue

area and will take two and a half to three years to be fully operational

employing 15 full-time employees.

HUWS (Herhof Urban Waste Solution) has

developed a patented method for recycling that is called dry-stabilate

process.

Precisely crushed solid waste is hermetically sealed in Herhof

-boxes where the water content is reduced using a biological degradation

process. After processing the company separates the reduced waste into various

components; metals for recycling, organics for composting, aggregate for road

fill and pelletised “green” fuel that can be sold to a electrical power

producer for energy generation.

Marie-Claude Boucher, HUWS president, said

that community input will determine where their plant is located. The plant

would require two acres of land, would take one and a half years to build and

employ nine workers. The HUWS process diverts 92 percent of waste from the

landfill.

HUWS can also build a co-generation component that produces

electricity for sale to the local power company. Boucher said one ton of

stabilate equals 2 barrels of diesel oil.

Canada Composting is proposing

to build what the company calls a fully integrated recovery plant that will

take trash and produce organic compost, liquid fertilizer, power itself and

have 1.2KWH of power left over for sale to the local electric company.

The

process begins with a materials recovery stage where plastics, metal, and paper

are removed from the waste stream and recycled.

The remaining organics

goes through a BTA process of metabolic digestion where the trash breakdown

produces a gas to power the recycling plant and produce 16,000 tons of compost

annually.

Canada Composting has three potential locations the first being

adjacent to the Koloa Mill, second at the site of Kauai Nursery and

Landscaping, a partner in the project, and behind the Lihue Refuse

station.

The proposed plant will require five acres of land and 16

full-time employees. Kevin Matthews, CCI president, said their process will

divert 72 percent of solid waste from the landfill and can be constructed to

blend with the local architecture. He showed an example of a plant in Germany

that resembled a farm.

This meeting completed the public presentations of

the five companies who were selected to bid on the 20 year County solid waste

management contract.

Jean Camp, executive assistant to Mayor Maryanne

Kusaka who is facilitating the bid process, said the public meetings produced a

lot of good feedback from the community and the local business.

“It gives

them an idea of what possibilities there are to expand their businesses,” said

Camp.

She said the county hopes to award a contract in August.