Abstract: The true need in waste management is the elimination of organic waste featuring the conversion of wastes to high value marketable products in a manner sufficient to support the costs and profit, derived from waste raw materials. Locally organized corporate entities will specialize in this advanced treatment of waste using the Gravity Pressure Vessel (GPV), invented by James Titmas and marketed by GeneSyst International, Incorporated, which can be used to convert waste into ethanol and other by-products. Such a paradigm shift in approach involves remarkable intrinsic merits for the host community, whilst introducing significant challenges in overcoming the status quo. Deliberate steps must be taken to accomplish that shift with a plan to mitigate the risks involved not only for the responsible local administrative parties, but for the permit writing authorities as well as the capital investor, but for the established practitioners and means of waste disposal as well. This presentation considers the complications involved in bringing a new technology to the market, the inherent resistance to change, and an insight in to why it takes several decades to introduce and establish a viable alternative to mature waste management practices and finally, how to contain and mitigate potential risks involved in the transition to a new way of doing things.

Economic Merit: By using this sealed and closed process, wastes can be handled directly inside the population center. Money paid for this service stays in and re-circulates in the municipality in the form of wages paid for labor and support services as well as the fundamental economic merit of selling products made in the community. The reversal of the economic cash flow from export to import of cash for recirculation within a metropolitan area has great impact and amounts to the equivalent of hundreds of dollars per person, each year. It is estimated that if all a city’s many forms of fiber based waste were converted to Ethanol, as much as 15% of vehicular fuels needed in the city could be produced in the city, thus reducing the drain of urban dollars for imported fuel, goods and services, and at the same time avoiding capital drain experienced from waste exporting services. The process of converting garbage and trash to Ethanol and other byproducts converts a cost to an income. This program reduces the demands from wastes collection and transport on the infrastructure of roads within the city. Persons in the city will be employed to prepare the products for market, sell the products, and transport these products.

Environmental Merit: The use of renewable organic material, such as fiber based waste, produces no net gain in greenhouse gas as the sources are not fossil fuels. Any fuel that will reduce the residuals of the partial combustion of fossil fuels will result in cleaner air and reduced health risks. Ethanol as a gasoline additive is an effective alternative to either Tetra Ethyl Lead or MTBE, both of which have serious environmental side effects. The practice of land filling produces one cubic meter of methane for every 4 kilograms of biodegradable organic debris buried in the ground. Methane is a greenhouse gas many times more significant than carbon dioxide and that landfill process is reported to represent 25% of global greenhouse gasses. Incineration does dramatically reduce the volume of waste, but tragically results in very significant acid gasses and toxic metal after-products. The process does not require separation of wastes by the citizens or businesses of the community. Wastes separation as necessary for the process will be accomplished at central service centers increasing efficiency, safety and efficacy in both collection and salvage yield. Timely, clean and efficient collection will reduce vector health complications associated with rodents and insects. The image of the city will be enhanced and restore the reputation of the city as a center for quality urban management and services, using free enterprise resources. A cleaner city contributes to the quality of life.
Legislative and Liability Merit: The city would not have to export wastes to other jurisdictions thereby gaining control over liabilities and reliability of wastes management practices. Because the process is based on free enterprise incentives and costs benefits, no flow control or artificial legislative regulation is mandated. The entire capital cost is privately sponsored. The process meets and sets the standard for present and anticipated wastes disposal regulations. Given ultimate disposal of the waste materials, insurance companies, for the first time, can quantify the risk of wastes management. The open ended liabilities of wastes storage (land fill) are avoided with clear cost predictions relating to insurance coverage without transferring the long term storage risks to the public domain. Every land fill incorporating biodegradable organic debris will putrefy over time, resulting in the loss of containment of the entire inventory of biodegradable materials.

Beneficial use Merit: Once collected and delivered, and using local labor, the wastes will be converted to products including Ethanol (an automobile fuel oxidant), Furfural (an industrial chemical), Yeast (a protein food supplement), Liquid Carbon Dioxide (used for flash freezing foods), Urea (used as fertilizer), Lime (used for road foundations and agriculture), Acetic acid (used in industry), and other products. The reduction in wastes volume will exceed 90% of truck weight as collected and delivered to the facility in the served community. The conversion to these products have the advantage that they can be stored or transported without significant loss in value. Neither steam, methane or electricity can be stored or exported at minimal costs from the metropolitan area and still retain their value. While some studies focus on the energy balance, that is Kilocalories or British Thermal Units in verses those same heat content units out, they miss the point of the economic merit of the form of heat energy. Ethanol, as a clean burning and portable fuel, has a market value (heat content per heat content) many times the market economic value of non portable or fixed base energy use fuels such as steam boilers or electric generation fuels.

Transitional Considerations: Most every community already has some method at hand to deal with the disposition of waste materials. It may involve either public or private investment in collection, transport, destruction or storage of waste materials. These methods can represent important investments made by either the local government, private enterprise, or both. In reality no community can arbitrarily and instantaneously stop what they are doing and make a sudden shift to a new way of doing things. The appropriate path is to introduce the new technology and then, over time, ramp in a greater percentage of market share based on several factors. These factors include employee and staff/administrative training, public education and acceptance, proven efficacy and efficiency on that community's waste materials (each community has a different recipe of wastes at hand), and the reasonable allocation of time for the amortization of the investment in the existing wastes management infrastructure. In most instances the emerging technology should join forces with the existing wastes management processes, motivated by the natural drawing card of enhanced profitability, efficacy and the other attributed merits as delineated hereinbefore. It is not the goal of these emerging methods to be simply cheaper than existing means, but to be competitive with those means whilst at the same time being more profitable.

The community consensus: What is not obvious how a community interacts to accept the process of investment in time, energy and resources of all types to accomplish any critical need of a metropolitan area. The need is to accept that a community acts as a "ROUND TABLE" to accomplish long term and vital needs of the community. In fact it does take time for a host of various interest groups to concur in how the resources of the people will be used.

The educators: even though the essence of invention is a teaching. Beyond the self-motivating goal of answering a need for the private gain of the process practitioners and investors, there is a critical need for those who have elected to be professional educators of engineers, and plant operators to define, construct, and operate this new process. This must be part of undergraduate education as well as continuing education at both the Bachelor of Science level and the Technical College level. The time required to introduce new technology to the professors, place the technology in textbooks, and produce uniform educational standards requires at least a generation of educators.

The lawyers: a new patent or method can not proceed without those skilled in the legal arts. It can not survive without those who are skilled in Civil law defending ownership and authorship as well as risk and liability identification and the just authorship and application of the laws. It is of marginal value without the art of the interpretation of laws to sustain the pressure to appreciate that there is a need to do a better job at keeping our life space clean. These attributes extend to the Judges as well as the staffs of government agencies that interpret the regulations and author the requests for presentation into the competition to win contracts for the means to manage the community's wastes.

The legislature: what can and can not be done with efficiency, safety, and cost effectiveness is at the heart of the intent of the law to cause a utility, government agency, industry, business, or citizen to do a better job in the way it imposes its wastes on its neighbors, or those with an impaired political voice. Often large communities elect to export their wastes to an area were the population is poor or sparse, or both. A sort of convenience that may result in a tyranny of the majority. If the legislative body comes to appreciate that they are exporting wealth and resources the nature of there actions will come to alter how wastes are actually managed.

The medical profession: just what is pollution and what is not pollution depends on its impact on life forms, including human beings, our domesticated agricultural dependents, and the flora and fauna in which we find ourselves in the role of a protector. The new wave of understanding will include how combinations of materials affect life quality, not just this chemical or that chemical. We are creating chemicals faster than single chemicals can be tested, and the tests for combinations of chemicals is at least one hundred times as difficult, and is only just beginning. The law now reads that the treatment required is based on the capability of existing equipment. The medical profession, doctors as well as veterinarians, will have to say what has to be done with less reliance on those who sell, specify, or select waste treatment equipment.

The financier: without organized and disciplined investment nothing of this magnitude can be built. This is true of both public and private funding. Education and fiscal management here are intertwined. If a Broker does not understand the true liabilities in mature waste processing technologies or the accumulating liabilities of “waste storage” technologies an investment will fail. The motivation for change must be understood with a balance established between the cost of money and the probability for success of any waste handling process, new or mature, and money availability adapted to that knowledge. Universal understanding in these collateral professions follows the acceptance by the technical, political, public relations and academic professions. None will be so lost as the financier that does not wish to get involved in appreciating the techno-marketing implications.

The public agency administrator: if something can not be Permitted, it can not be built. There is a tendency for those who elect to invest, especially in new technology, to keep that technology a trade secret. That contradicts the Permit procedure which is based on specific knowledge of what is to be built and the appreciation of the Permitting authorities that what is to be built has the capability to perform. Here the quality of academic institutions and the academic qualifications of individuals granting Permits are intertwined. The nature of gravity pressure vessel operation, especially the absence of operator exposure, the absence of an air emission, and the absence of toxic residuals, and the absence of reliance on storage is fully consistent with the objectives of the Permitting authorities.

The public media interests: we must all fully understand the merit of this kind of education, be it radio, television, or newsprint, movies, or magazine articles. The media teaches us in many ways. They teach the public, and the politicians. They give a confidence to the investor, and alert the technical world that tends to live in its own shell. Media is the key to knowing what others are doing and by their screening give credence to those chosen for exposure. They also identify and reinforce where the public interest lies. The graphic capability of the media can convert technical knowledge to lay knowledge. We are a copycat culture, and no one is so broadly influenced by the media than our law¬givers, their agencies, and those persons who ultimately make the political selection of where our environmental dollars are invested. This is a self feeding arena as the media responds and expands on the public interest they actually foster.

The environment advocate interests: We have a great deal of sympathy for the instincts within all of us that assert a natural understanding that wastes of all kinds are adverse to our health. The NIMBY (Not In Our Back Yard) spirit lives, and the more we discover through hard analysis, the more we realize that intuitive understandings can have a valid foundation. Indefinite storage must not be described as disposal. Health and human impact from wastes on one person in 2,00, 20,000 or 200,000 may be well and good if you are not personally involved. The ultimate threat comes from those who assume that storage will maintain its integrity forever, which it obviously can not. In time all storage configurations must deteriorate, and thus threaten its locale.
What is our role? Our role in all this, by our own choice, is to be that of a person that offers a solution to all these parties that have been listed here as role makers. We are just one tooth in a gear with many teeth. This wheel must turn for many years before each tooth knows what the other teeth are doing, and what they know about what the others know, to have merit. I have spent my entire adult career as a practitioner in the field of Civil Engineering, with special interest in wastes treatment. Hundreds of times over the last four dozen years clients and friends have asked me “What can be done”, and I have shown them what can be approved and funded. In my own heart I wished I could do better, and given them a wider management choice.

We in the sanitary engineering profession have known for a long time what the ideal waste treatment tool should be like. It must actually destroy waste or convert it to a useful product. It must do this in a closed system. No shell game. No conversion from wastes in water, to air or land or back again. It must be economically competitive. It must confirm the effectiveness of the procedure before the waste is released from control. The waste must be so processed faster than it is being created. The greater the population density and extant, the higher the standard for wastes control must be. It must accomplish the task at hand without leaving the site of waste creation and not depend on cross country or cross global transport.

Nothing is so bizarre than paying the cost of shipping of wastes from one location to another if we are not going to do anything better than bury it, or dump it in water, or throw it in the air or on the land, or even some combination of these. The risk of spill is great, the prospect of loss of control absolute, it is a waste of resources and money, and it carries a profound probability of imposing wastes unjustly on the poor and the politically weaker population.

Risks and Liabilities: In any commercial endeavor, liabilities exist which may impact the return on investment. Liabilities can be mitigated using conventional techniques known to the industry, and executed using qualified and educated personnel. These techniques include initial and ongoing training, design for waste minimization, insurance procedures, safety planning, subcontracted specialization, and bonding. Although this will not eliminate all liabilities, it can serve to divert liability considerations to non-recurring expenses and create an internal discipline whereby costs are specifically invested area by area to limit liability exposure. Finally, the most significant liability of all is the philosophical selection of which environmental technology to invest in.

Training considerations: An estimated eighty percent of all industrial waste discharges can be attributed to loss of product through human error. The initial and ongoing training of personnel in work safety and emergency procedures is vital to the facility’s ability to handle a spill or off-specification product. This technique has two components, first is the training, and second is the design of the facility itself to contain and reprocess spills, leaks, and off specification products. When employees understand why a safety procedure is needed, they are more likely to accept and follow those procedures, thus avoiding spills and improving response when spills occur.

Fundamental design approaches: There are certain precautions that can be economically designed into a new plant which would be very cost effecive. Some of these are driven by EPA and other permit procedures, and others by the economic value of controlling the loss of product. One example includes sheltered spill containment. Simple roof structures over secondary tank containment will prevent rain from mixing with spilled or leaked product. This will allow the products to be reprocessed within the system. Another example is the recovery of vapors lost when transferring liquids from tank to tank. Tanks will be connected by vent pipes, so that as one tank empties into the other, it will be filled with the air from the other tank instead of outside air, thus preventing vapors from escaping. This has both safety and economic benefits. These are liabilities which are minimized by initial design concept.

Insurance coverage: Within limits, monies can be invested as a safety net to control the impact on the return on investment using insurance coverage. In selected governmental jurisdictions, worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance, general liability insurance for employees, and to some extent health insurance are included in employee costs as cost of sales, administration, or production as a part of annual salary allocations.

Safety Planning: As in environmental permitting, the handling of industrial materials safety has become institutionalized through the permit procedures. Examples include OSHA, and the local fire, building and safety codes. These permit applications direct the applicant to provide for safety programs that are standard in the industry. For instance, how are combustible liquids handled, what explosion control provisions are integrated into the electrical system. Not the least is the qualifications and abilities of properly applied and motivated supervision techniques. In the brief biographies of the key members of the program, the reader will note the number of safety awards garnered by Donald Bogner in the very difficult safety control field of heavy construction. That is a combination of planning and presence of mind in an atmosphere of confusion.

Qualified subcontract specialists: Certain aspects of any industrial enterprise can be managed best from a liability standpoint through selective subcontracts. Two of the most common include initial construction and the handling of a unique material. In this instance, an example of the latter is the storage and controlled delivery of Oxygen for use in the process. Rather than assuming a liability for this commodity, it is safer, simpler, and even cheaper to pay a trained vendor to supply oxygen at an on site facility and pay him a unit price for every ton delivered to specification. The liability control costs are included in the unit price of Oxygen.

Insurance Bonds: The easiest example of liability control through Bonding is the contractual relationship between the owner and the contractor erecting the facility. These may include bid bonds, performance bonds, and maintenance bonds, all in addition to the contractors’ own set of employee insurance precautions. In the execution of most projects the failure of a sub-system is typically identified as related to the installation of a key piece of equipment. Does it pump at the rate and pressure specified, is the wiring correct, is the control correct? Do the various construction disciplines interlock without gaps between their responsibilities? These issues as liabilities are mitigated through the Performance Bond, which covers the period between the start of work and the Engineer’s Certificate of Substantial Completion which memorializes that date by which the facility is able to function as intended. This is augmented by an extended bond period referred to as the maintenance bond, wherein parts or components which fail prematurely are replaced. By agreement, these may be for one or more years, and serve as a bridge between the contractor efforts and the in-house maintenance staff.

The fundamental question which must be answered by an investor is “Where should I invest my money?” In order to answer this question, the investor must educate himself on the investment opportunities, including but not limited to short term and long term profitability, short term and long term liabilities of the process, capital costs, and current and future laws and regulations which will impact the process. When evaluating waste technologies investments, there are only a few choices. The option of Landfill is merely a method of accumulating liabilities. Another option is Incineration, which converts solid waste into an airborne waste. This only changes the liability. The final option is conversion to a beneficial use product.

With conversion to beneficial use, one must evaluate the marketability of the products. In the case presented here, alcohol is a highly marketable product. The next choice is what will be the source of raw materials for the process. Two options are readily available to the investor, newsprint and municipal solid waste fluff. Since one must pay for newsprint, and can be paid to process fluff, fluff is the more economically sound choice. With the source of raw material, a process must be chosen to convert this fluff into fermentable sugars. Two options available are enzymes and acid hydrolysis. The use of acid hydrolysis is more reliable and less expensive than use of enzymes, and produces a sterile interim product despite the obvious broad spectrum contamination of the raw in material.

The adaptation of any process: All enterprises have liabilities. Any that can be identified prior to the fact can be mitigated using techniques common to the arts of design, construction, and good management. Those that can not be predicted will occur and impact the return on investment. By prudent administration, these will become one time expenses and controlled through expanding on one or more of the above delineated liability control measures. The single most important factor in limiting liability is education and understanding by the principals and the investor.

Stage one: At the inception of this four-stage process, the engineers and the client shall agree on an initial budget for stage one activities, and the mechanics of the process funding. Working with the existing inventory of the waste to be processed in terms of components, location, configuration and quantity provided by the client, the engineers shall rough out a conceptual cost/benefit analysis and schedule the procedural and subcontract program to effect the stage two evaluation. Budget and cash payment terms will be agreed for the next stage. The engineers and the Client review the existing or historic costs of disposal for the target services. The role of the Client's existing consultant is integrated into the program. Based on the technical and fiscal merit of the stage one presentation, and on approval by the client, the process will proceed to stage two.

Stage two: includes a laboratory simulation of what will go into the process, and what will come out of the process. It includes selection and collection of representative waste samples, transport of the samples to the respective objective testing laboratories, initial analysis, an initial target conditions simulation, a post simulation analysis, catalyst option analysis, procedural analysis and interim report. Subsequent repeat cycles may be conducted for yield optimization. The engineers and the client will review the results and confirm the procedural optimization and define the required peripheral support equipment for pretreatment and post treatment needs.

During stage two the range of wastes verification will be checked. This will include rate of growth, water volume, planned changes in production, periodic cycles, seasonal variations, waste component variability, flexibility requirements, and the permitting plan. Cost estimates are advanced to a condition of closer focus. A site is selected within or adjacent to the facility and transport requirements are defined. A geological profile and bit program are developed to define costs for drilling. Turnkey construction costs for the facility are polished and along with schematic drawings. In the alternative, a privatization proposal may be provided to the client if requested.

As an option in stage two, the investors may invest in a pilot plant to scale up the conceptual design to about 5 to 10 percent of the capacity of a production unit. One of the drawbacks of a gravity pressure vessel is that it cannot be made small, and a pilot plant may cost as much as one third of a commercial unit. The purpose of a pilot plant is to correlate the engineering calculations with a reduced scale facility and to upscale laboratory predictions, and last but by no leans least, serve as the vehicle to train plant employees as well as the plant supervision and administrative staff..

Stage three is the full-scale production facility. It is initiated by the definition of contract effort using detailed engineering drawings and specifications, the application for permits as required, the selection and ordering of long term delivery components, activation of lease agreements, and property access for initial construction and drilling. During this stage all performance guarantees, including performance and maintenance bonds, of the executing contractors will be formally documented to the benefit of the engineers and to the client. The engineers and/or the client will establish an escrow fund for the retirement and closure of the facility after all operations have ceased or at some pre-selected calendar date. The engineers will be responsible for all construction management services. Toward the end of the actual construction stage both dry and wet runs of the operation and troubleshooting will be conducted by the engineers exercising all aspects of the program including safety, security, collection, transport, pre-treatment, processing, measurement, post-treatment, and residuals disposition. This ongoing procedure is anticipated in transition to specified facility performance levels.

Stage four: is the operation and maintenance stage. During ongoing operation, the engineers shall provide services for a contract fee including real time and remote performance monitoring, maintenance oversight, ongoing operator and maintenance staff training, re-calibration of meters and instruments, and performance review annual reports for the client. From time to time technical upgrades to the process are anticipated and an option will be provided to the client for incorporation of those improvements in the client's facility. The operational stage tenure will be on a contracted basis and may last from one to twenty years as agreed between the project technical staff advisors and the client.