Who's Who: Making Fuel from Garbage at the USDA

Name: Bill Orts

Age: 49

Occupation: Research leader, Bioproducts Chemistry and Engineering,

What products do you develop here? We make either biofuels or bioproducts. About 10 years ago we started researching bioproducts. We became the “not corn” group, making [things] from oil, rice, rice straw, barley, even garbage, and that’s got us famous.

Here is a bottle of ethanol made from garbage from Salinas. We would have loved to make fuels from rice straw, but you’d have to bring in a lot and store it [seasonally]. The one thing that’s the same [year-round] is garbage.

A company called CR3 came up with the idea of making [biofuel out of garbage]. We’ve worked with Waste Management in Reno and all along the West Coast to advance technologies in recycling. They [extract] the cellulose from garbage for $25 a ton; the farmers were asking $40 a ton.

How do you get biofuel from garbage? Pure cellulose [is] a string of sugars; you break down the string of sugars to simple sugar, and then feed it to yeast. It’s almost the same as working with pure cornstarch. But wood is only 50 percent cellulose; paper is 80 to 90 percent cellulose. Rice straw is less than 60 percent cellulose.

Curbside garbage goes into an autoclave [a steam cooker]; 20 minutes later, it looks like bottles and cans floating in gunk. [Some things are caught in a trommel screen.] Polyethylene and polypropylene bags melt; PET and styrene float out.  We can get 75 percent conversion to ethanol. It doesn’t have to be ethanol; ethanol has only two-thirds of the energy value of gasoline.

It’s the world’s most expensive ethanol right now, but it’s not just about the ethanol: it’s to close the garbage loop. Patrick Matthews of the Salinas Valley Solid Waste Authority Board says he wants landfills to be obsolete by the time he retires.

What about the gases that come from burning garbage? You can always clean up every gas stream, if you have scrubbers on your incinerators. You can burn badly, and you can burn well. You have to spend money to burn well.

Describe other bioproducts. We developed papers out of rice straw to make single-use items. About 10 to 15 years ago, the USDA started working wih companies to have them not use virgin materials for single-use products. This also adds value to agricultural products. [For example,] we helped the EarthShell company to [make] starch and fiber Big Mac packages. Since then we’ve improved them; they don’t need coating, they’re lighter weight. EarthShell is making plates; you can buy them at Costco.

How many scientists are in your unit? There are 13 senior scientists; about 32 of us are hard-funded, and then we do well because we get funding from companies. We’ve partnered with Chevron, and they’ve helped us expand our capabilities and leverage our expertise. An oil company is really a great engineering company.

Every Wednesday afternoon students from , Kennedy High and Richmond High – we take six from each school – come over, meet with one of our scientists for three hours. They have a course in molecular biology, plant studies, domestic rubbers, [for instance]; we make bioproducts and use food dye with them. This is the “Academic Workshop”; we’ve been doing it for about a decade, from January to June.

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