Waste Not! Carroll

By Carrie Ann KnauerTimes Staff Writer

TANEYTOWN — About 100 people showed up to the Taneytown CityCouncil meeting Tuesday night for a presentation about a facilitythat would theoretically vaporize trash and leave only recyclablematerials in its place — a concept that led to many questions aboutan offer that seemed too good to be true.

But those residents will have to come back to the next meetingto get more of their questions answered. Due to a closed sessionthat the City Council had scheduled for 8:45 p.m. after notanticipating such a turnout, Mayor Jim McCarron ended the meetingafter only a handful of residents were able to ask questions.

However, many of the questions that were asked — by residents,City Council members and County Commissioners Richard Rothschild,R-District 4, and Robin Bartlett Frazier, R-District 1 — exposedthe underlying skepticism about the company’s offer to build a1,500- to 3,000-ton-per-day facility to manage solid waste, builtand operated with 100 percent private funds.

“Why Taneytown?” McCarron asked after the council members hadall posed their questions.

Oscar Padilla, CEO of ALFA Group LLC, explained that his companyis in negotiations with seven other cities to build their firstplasma gasification facility, which would also be the largest onein the United States, when they were contacted by Westminsterresident John Bixler about Carroll County as a potential site.

“We were looking for a perfect spot, and Mr. Bixler offered us aperfect spot,” Padilla said. “We think Taneytown is it.”

Bixler introduced ALFA Group at the start of the meeting, andsaid that he has been studying plasma gasification for a decade andthought it would be a better way for the county to manage its solidwaste than landfilling, the current method, or building acounty-owned waste-to-energy incinerator, as the county iscontracted to do with Frederick County.

Frederick County officials have said they are looking to breakground on the 1,500 ton-per-day incinerator this summer, butCarroll’s new board of county commissioners has said it would liketo investigate the project from scratch before continuing on withthe project.

ALFA Group has offered to pay the $1.5 million commitment to getthe county out of the agreement, and has also offered to contributemoney toward construction of a Taneytown bypass. The company wouldalso use gray water, or effluent from the city’s wastewatertreatment plant, as a coolant in the plant — and then offer thepost-process clean water back to the city as distilled water.

Residents were confused about the company’s technology and howit differs from an incinerator, and how it was possible that theprocess does not create any pollution of its own.

Padilla explained that the solid waste would be heated to 5,000to 12,000 degrees in an oxygen-deprived chamber.

“We don’t set anything on fire,” Padilla said.

Instead, the materials are broken down to their molecular level,he said. The end products are metals and glass slag, which can besold on the recycling market, he said, and a synthetic gas that iskept onsite and burned to fuel the system. The facility alsoproduces a lot of steam from the cooling of all the materials, andthe steam is used to spin turbines and produce electricity. Twentypercent of that electricity would be used by the facility, Padillasaid, and the other 80 percent can be sold on the grid.

Several residents asked why there aren’t any other plants likethis in the United States if it’s such an amazing technologicalsystem. Padilla said that there are a few dozen plants, but most ofthem are owned by the government or military and used on muchsmaller scales than would be needed to handle a regular stream ofmunicipal solid waste. To make the system most efficient, however,this system would be built large enough to hand several counties’waste, Padilla said, such as Howard, Frederick and Baltimorecounties.

Rothschild asked Padilla if the company’s investors wouldrequire contracts with these counties before putting up the capitalfor the project, and asked if the company had met with the MarylandDepartment of the Environment yet to see if it would even bepossible for them to get an operating permit in the state.

Padilla said that his investors would not require contracts torelease the funding, and said that the company won’t contact theMDE until it knows that the city and county would be interested inthe company pursuing a plant in Taneytown.

The handful of residents who did ask questions wanted to knowabout the company’s background, the technology and its safety andexpress their doubts that the company could do everything that itclaimed. And like McCarron, many wanted to know, “WhyTaneytown?”

Padilla said he had attended the county’s small business seminarheld a few weeks ago and he agreed with a statement by CommissionerDoug Howard, R-District 5, made about Carroll County being theright place and now as the right time for businesses to grow inCarroll.

“We’d like to be right here, right now,” Padilla said.

Reach staff writer Carrie Ann Knauer at 410-857-7874 orcarrie.knauer@carrollcountytimes.com.

© 2012 Carroll County Times.