After a dedicated, 25-year effort to establish recycling, America is still burning or placing in landfills 68% of its wastes at an annual cost in the billions of dollars.

Carbon-based wastes represent the nation’s most promising and virtually untapped renewable energy source.   Their use as feedstocks for the production of liquid and electric energy is consistent with nature’s own cycle of carbon creation and assimilation. 

It is estimated that the United States generates from 1.5 billion to 2.0 billion tons of organic waste every year, including municipal solid waste, biosolids, animal wastes, green wastes, construction and demolition wastes, pulp and paper wastes, plastics, auto shredding residues, agricultural residues and forest thinnings.  The nation also disposes of 300 million used tires each year. 

Approximately one-third of these materials is being generated in our local communities and is already being collected and transported to landfills.  All of them are potential feedstocks for the waste conversion technologies that are the focus of NPE’s business strategy.  Foremost among these technologies are those that co-produce ethanol and green power from carbon-based wastes.

The company’s goal is to employ technologies that reduce the need to grow food derived resources or cellulosic plant materials as feedstocks for biofuels production. 

According to the Argonne National Laboratory, on a life-cycle basis, cellulosic ethanol will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 86% as compared to an energy equivalent amount of gasoline, and likely by 100% or more when carbon-based wastes are used as its feedstocks.

These new technologies will assist municipalities in:

• Reducing their costs of waste collection, transport and disposal;

• Extending by up to 80% the useful lives of existing landfills; and

• Recovering five times more energy by thermally decomposing municipal waste before it is placed in a landfill than can be obtained by combusting landfill biogas.