Company that converts waste plastic to oil secures $22 Million in financing April 2011

April 5, 2011 - Agilyx Corporation, an alternative energy company (pronounced AJ-il-ix) who is the first in the world to economically convert difficult-to-recycle waste plastics into crude oil through a patented system that is scalable, versatile, and environmentally beneficial, announced in March that it has secured $22 million in Series B funding. The funding is led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), and joined by new strategic investors, Waste Management, Inc. and Total Energy Ventures International, an affiliate of oil and gas major Total S.A.. Existing investors, Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, Saffron Hill Ventures, and Reference Capital also participated in this latest round. "This latest investment in Agilyx represents a significant milestone for our company," said Chris Ulum, chief executive officer of Agilyx Corporation. "With these funds and strategic partners at our side, we are well positioned to help our customers and the communities in which they operate improve the diversion and recovery of waste plastics, and create new local sources of crude oil. By providing this alternative while the world's insatiable appetite for oil continues, our solution can offset the use of fossil crude oil and create new cleantech jobs in the process." Agilyx's fully permitted, patented waste plastic conversion technology recycles mixed waste plastic into synthetic crude oil in a scalable, versatile, and environmentally-beneficial manner. Its expertise is in its efficient, anaerobic thermal reclamation process and in the commercial application of this process, including building and operating commercial scale systems, and successfully marketing synthetic crude oil as a feedstock to existing petroleum refineries. The Company deploys its systems with companies engaged in the management of plastic waste streams. Today Agilyx's facility near Portland, Oregon is the largest commercially operational waste plastic to synthetic crude oil facility in North America. The Company was the first of its kind to successfully permit in the U.S. and has the first known refinery off take agreement in the industry. Agilyx has produced and sold more than 120,000 gallons of crude oil, meaning its technology has recovered over 1 million pounds of plastic that would otherwise have been landfilled or incinerated, while providing cleantech jobs and a new domestic source of crude oil. "Agilyx is the only company using waste to make a truly viable synthetic crude product. With this capital and the addition of world class strategic partners like Total and Waste Management, we are confident in the ability of Agilyx to quickly make a positive impact on the way mixed waste plastic is handled, and the way fuel is produced around the world," said Amol Deshpande, a member of KPCB's GreenTech Investment Team. "Waste Management wants to maximize the value of the materials it manages," said Tim Cesarek, managing director of Organic Growth at Waste Management. "Agilyx's technology complements Waste Management's advancement of thermal chemical conversion technology platforms and provides us with a viable option for processing contaminated and difficult to recycle waste plastics while creating a high value commodity." "As a major plastics manufacturer and as an oil refining company, Total is pleased to support the further development of Agilyx, whose technology offers a scalable economic option to recovering waste plastics," said Manoelle Lepoutre, senior vice president Sustainable Development and Environment for TOTAL SA, and president of Total Energy Ventures International. Agilyx is an alternative energy company who's proprietary technology reduces plastic waste normally destined for landfills, produces refinery-ready crude oil, and creates community and local jobs with its small-scale, distributed waste management and energy production approach. The company's affordable, modular systems are sold to industrial and municipal waste plastic generators and aggregators looking to reduce disposal-related costs and increase plastics-associated revenues – all while meeting challenging environmental standards, curbing the need for new landfills, and extracting the often-unused and untapped energy contained within waste plastic. Agilyx has the only known refinery offtake agreement in the industry and currently ships crude oil from its showcase facility in Portland, Oregon to a refinery in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

Company discovers formula to turn waste plastic to fuel Sept 2010

September 27, 2010 - Moinuddin Sarker, Ph.D., MCIC, and VP, Research & Development for Natural State Research Inc. (NSR) recently announced the discovery of a unique formula to make liquid fuel from waste plastic. Dr. Sarker and his team of research chemists have developed a formula to take most types of plastic and turn them into liquid fuel. 95 percent of the plastic is turned into liquid fuel while the remaining 5 percent can be used as a substitute for coal with a higher BTU value. In today’s world this new discovery has a triple benefit, according to NSR. First, plastic that would normally end up in a landfill will be down cycled. Second is the benefit of the fuel itself, for automobiles, trucks, aircraft and electricity that will be created in the process. Third, plastic manufacturers can proceed with new and innovative plastic manufacturing techniques without worrying about the ramifications of their products becoming waste in landfills. No matter how the NSR technology is used, an organization will benefit from “carbon credits” predicated upon the elimination of the waste plastic and the reduction in dependence on fossil fuels. NSR has successfully handled most types of plastics and on a commercial scale a conversion plant will ensure zero emissions. Plastic materials tested by NSR include, but are not limited to plastic bags, water bottles, milk containers, and a wide variety of PVC materials.

Packaging: Compostable Chip Bags May 2010

As we reported in our last edition, SunChips®, Frito Lay Canada's popular line of multigrain snacks, has introduced the world's first 100 per cent compostable chip bag. The news release extols that "This green innovation, a first-of-its kind initiative, will change the way Canadians hear, see and think about product packaging in the future." Starting in March 2010, SunChips packaging will be made from more than 90 per cent renewable, plant-based materials. This new package will completely break down into compost in a hot, active compost pile in approximately 14 weeks. On store shelves, it has a unique sound, the new sound of green. The company has provided some hip promotional materials, including a "Greenvention" contest and sound bites that you can listen to at www.sunchips.ca/newsoundofgreen The compostable chip bag was launched in March in the 225g & 425g size bags, with the balance of SunChips packages transitioning into the compostable packaging in August 2010. Marc Guay, President, Frito Lay Canada says the packaging made from renewable material "represents the next small step in Frito Lay Canada's environmental sustainability journey." Frito Lay Canada has worked for more than a decade to reduce the company's environmental impact. In addition to the compostable chip bag, it has diverted more than 92 per cent of manufacturing waste from landfills into re-use streams in 2009 and reused approximately 30 million shipping cartons annually and 200 million since 1999 -- equivalent to more than 300,000 trees saved annually and more than 2 million trees saved since 1999. The renewable material used to produce the SunChips bag is made from a plant-based PLA material. PLA, polylactic acid, is a versatile and compostable polymer made from starch. After four years of research and testing, Frito-Lay North America's Research and Development team identified PLA as the key material that meets the company's performance expectations. The compostable packaging has a different sound than traditional bags because the plant-based materials are not as soft at room temperature. The development has been met with concern, however, from some professionals in the recycling industry, as such material may cross-contaminate recycling lines when it doesn't end up in compost green bins. Vivian De Giovanni, Executive Director of the Municipal Waste Association says, "Municipalities are concerned with: residents being confused and putting some of the PLA in the recycling stream and some petroleum based products in the Green Bin. "The broader issue is not about trying to establish barriers for businesses trying to do the right environmental things, but about fostering communication between those that design the product packaging and those that handle the packaging at end of life." The SunChips' compostable packaging has been certified through the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI), the only internationally recognized labeling program. As such it presents the opportunity for incorporation into waste management programs destined for composting, provided the local infrastructure is both available and capable of including this packaging material within their system. In the months ahead, SunChips says it will work with local composting initiatives to enable the new packaging to be included in green bin programs as much as possible. Where recyclers are concerned, composting leaders are excited. "Having designed packaging with the environment in mind, SunChips' certified compostable packaging will help raise awareness of the environmental importance of composting," says Susan Antler, Executive Director of the Compost Council of Canada. "We hope the introduction of initiatives such as the compostable SunChips bag will encourage and make it easier for Canadians to participate in composting such that over time, we will see an increase in the number of Canadian households that compost. This will hopefully also spur the industry to continue to develop and enhance the technology needed to create packaging from renewable resources such that it can be easily incorporated into waste management systems."

Green bins: A wasted effort? July 2009

Green bin waste trucked to N.Y March 2009

Peel Region shipped 50 truckloads of unfinished compost to Cornerstone Landscaping in Barrie because its organics processing facility in Caledon had to shut down due to odours. Ontario municipalities 'scrambling' to cope with surge in kitchen refuse and plant closings Mar 01, 2009 Ontario facilities that compost kitchen waste are in such short supply that thousands of tonnes have been sent to the United States for incineration and at least one municipality has improperly dumped truckloads within the province. Severe odour problems are the main reason for the closing of facilities, including Peel Region's compost-curing location in Caledon and two plants in Quebec that took thousands of tonnes from Toronto and York region. At the same time, new facilities in Ontario can barely meet the surging demand from municipal green bin programs that recycle food waste into high-grade compost. "If somebody goes out of business then we've got a real problem – there is no extra capacity in the system," said Durham Region's Cliff Curtis, chair of Regional Public Works Commissioners of Ontario. "In many ways, we are victims of our own success. There have been more (organics) collected than expected, and we are scrambling." Pushed by the Ontario government to recycle organics, municipalities collected 251,368 tonnes of kitchen scraps in green bins in 2007 – a jump of nearly 30 per cent over 2006. Those numbers will only go higher. Toronto is expanding its green bin program into apartments, increasing organic collections from about 115,000 tonnes a year to 170,000 tonnes within the next 16 months. The green bin program has grown so fast that it has outstripped the ability of municipalities to process the organics locally, creating a new carbon footprint since the material is trucked to facilities hundreds of kilometres away. The program collects mountains of leftover steak, hamburgers, vegetables and (depending on the municipality) diapers and pet waste, diverting them from the landfills into compost. It is the meat products that tend to cause the odours. The vast popularity of organic recycling has placed cities in a vulnerable position. When a facility shuts down, city managers need backup plans because excess rotting food cannot be stored in warehouses. Despite pressuring municipalities to recycle organics, the Ontario government has not created a comprehensive plan to help them do so, although ministry sources say the current review of the Waste Diversion Act will bring change. Some cities, like Toronto, have decided to get into the processing business, with long-term plans to own facilities that will provide two-thirds of the processing capacity. "We've been shuffling since our program started in 2002," said Toronto's Geoff Rathbone, general manager of solid waste. "It has been a challenge every day to find sufficient capacity for organics ... they have to flow every day." Among recent contingency plans: • York Region trucked 11,864 tonnes of kitchen waste to Covanta Energy, an incinerator in Niagara Falls, N.Y., between March and August 2008 when its Quebec processor was shut down. • The City of Guelph ships 10,000 tonnes of kitchen waste every year to Covanta Energy. During the mid-1990s, the city was considered a composting pioneer but closed its facility in 2006 due to odours and structural weakness caused by ammonia. • Peel Region shipped 50 truckloads of partially composted kitchen waste to Barrie topsoil company Cornerstone Landscaping in 2007. The company did not have environment ministry approval to accept "unfinished" compost, which contains inorganic material, an environment ministry spokesperson said. Mounds of the compost – including tattered plastic bags – remain on the site. Ministry of environment spokesperson Kate Jordan said investigators responded to an odour complaint about Cornerstone in late 2007 but did not issue an order against the company because it co-operated in the cleanup. Jordan said plastic bags included in the compost defined it as "unfinished." Cornerstone and Peel are now working under the oversight of the province to remove thousands of tattered plastic bags that held the organics, Jordan said. Cornerstone's owner, Rick Sova, said his company did not need ministry approvals to take the organics, saying the compost was already finished when it arrived on site. "We took the material, we screened it, we processed it into a good organic medium for growing results, the Region of Peel is taking back the plastic and they're processing it," Sova said. Larry Conrad is the acting director of waste management for Peel Region. He said Peel sent the material to Cornerstone because odour problems forced the region to close its outdoor curing facility in Caledon. He said they also believed it was a finished product. The region is seeking approvals to build a new composting facility in Caledon. "Composting is a tough industry," Conrad said. "It is an industry that has a lot of odour problems. We operated our composting plant in Caledon for many years with no odour issues, but obviously we weren't immune to it." Every municipality collects different items and uses a slightly different composting process, but the system generally works like this: Bags of kitchen waste are picked up from neighbourhood curbs and taken to processing facilities, where the food is dumped into enormous vats and separated from the plastic bags and errant shampoo bottles. It continues through the system, sometimes taking weeks, until the organics have turned into a thick, dark material with a heavy ammonia-like odour. It is then trucked to a composting facility, which turns it into the compost that is given to residents or sold in stores to be spread on gardens and lawns. The juggling act to keep composting – and diverting from overflowing landfills – has forced cities to look further afield for their processors. Toronto, for example, had shipped roughly 1,000 truckloads of organic waste a year to Quebec. That arrangement ended last November when the Quebec environment ministry limited the company's intake due to odour problems. In that case, Toronto quickly ramped up their contracts with two new Ontario facilities, Orgaworld, a Dutch-owned company that opened a facility near London, and Universal Resource in Welland. The city also has plans to build two processing facilities, at the Disco Transfer Station in north Etobicoke and the Dufferin Waste Management Facility in North York.

Blue-box leftovers go to China and back Feb 2009

Oliver Stephenson drives a forklift into bales of paper at the Dufferin Processing Facility in Toronto Feb. 5, 2009. Toronto sent up to 20,000 tonnes of mixed paper to a China's Nine Dragons mill in both 2007 and 2008. Will firms bankroll recycling? Within five years, Ontario taxpayers will no longer be paying for half of the blue box program if a draft plan to have producers pay the full cost of recycling the items they create is approved. Ontario's recycling scraps – dirty peanut butter jars, plastic toys, and unsorted paper – are being shipped to Asia at a rate of thousands of tonnes a month. The blue-box castoffs are sorted by low-paid workers in huge factories, and recycled into inexpensive toys, shoes and colourful cardboard packages, before being sold back to Ontarians, where they fill the blue boxes once again. Garbage experts say this revolving door is a necessary evil that will continue until the province has better recycling facilities so cities can process their own garbage. "The question is, how much do we want to transport materials around?" said Glenda Gies, executive director of Waste Diversion Ontario, which oversees the provincial blue-box program. "We really do want to support the Ontario economy, we want to process these materials here." Most residents recycle with the belief they are helping the environment and are unaware that their municipalities are shipping materials to China and South Korea, creating a huge new carbon footprint. "It is a contentious issue here," said Jo-Anne St. Godard, executive director of the Recycling Council of Ontario. "We took advantage of (China's) cheaper labour force to have them clean, or re-clean, our recyclables, to sort out the more valuable items from the less valuable." With the downturn in the recycling commodities market, China's demand for low-end mixed paper and plastic "residue" from blue boxes dropped considerably. But, Toronto, which sent up to 20,000 tonnes of mixed paper to China's massive Nine Dragons mill in both 2007 and last year, reports that in January, the mill began requesting more of the city's paper. Toronto gets paid roughly $30 to $40 per tonne of mixed paper sent to China. According to Geoff Rathbone, general manager of Toronto's solid waste department, that worked out to be about $600,000 to $800,000 in 2007 and 2008. In addition to shipping to China, Rathbone said the city sends about 10,000 tonnes a year of its "polycoat" milk and juice cartons to South Korea. If Toronto moves ahead with plans to recycle disposable coffee cups, it will send them to the same South Korean facility, as long as the owners can handle the influx, he said. Still, Rathbone believes local paper mills and recycling facilities are the best option. "In the long term, I don't think (shipping to Asia) is a sustainable way to go," he said. It is not clear how many tonnes of Ontario's recycled goods are sent to Asia each year. A study published by Waste Diversion Ontario looked at shipping data – voluntarily supplied by municipalities and private recyclers. Based on their information, the authors of the report concluded that four per cent of the 937,979 tonnes of blue-box materials sold in 2006 went to China, and a lesser number to South Korea. WDO's Gies said more ongoing studies are needed before the full picture is known. St. Godard said North American mills generally require materials be properly sorted and clean. But some municipalities, like Toronto, allow all recycled goods to be mixed into the same blue bin, because it is cheaper and easier for residents. "You end up co-mingling materials that have to be sorted and re-sorted and re-sorted and by the time they actually reach the end market they are still so contaminated that the mills here cannot take them. But China has an extra layer of labour that can sift through them," she said. To get to China from Toronto, the mixed paper is stacked in bales, placed in shipping containers and sent across country to the port of Vancouver by train, said Jake Westerhof, of Canada Fibres, which sells Toronto's paper to Nine Dragons. From Vancouver, it is placed on a large freighter ship and spends several weeks at sea before arriving in one of China's southern ports. It is moved into a truck a driven several hours before arriving at the massive Nine Dragons paper mill in the province of Guangdong. Rathbone believes the increase in orders from China means the market will slowly rebound. He says Toronto will continue shipping its paper to Nine Dragons, and pointed out the city's contract requires that the mill adhere to environmental standards, along with health and safety rules for its workers.

An end to plastic bottle pollution? Feb 2009

An end to plastic bottle pollution may be in sight. ENSO Bottles, of Phoenix, Arizona is introducing a biodegradable PET plastic bottle that will change the way we think about plastic. In 2007, there were more than four billion pounds of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic bottles that were burned or ended up in landfills, roadsides, streams and oceans. Thousands of years from now they will still be there. “The pollution problem is enormous and continues to grow,” said Danny Clark, founder of ENSO Bottles, LLC. Clark said ENSO has developed a more “Earth Friendly" biodegradable plastic bottle. “ENSO knows that biodegradable bottles are just part of the solution, and that’s why ENSO is developing a recycling partner program for consumers, local and state governments,” said Clark. Clark added that, “Enso bottles are not oxo-biodegradables or PLA (Polylactic Acid). ENSO bottles are 100 per cent biodegradable and 100 per cent recyclable PET plastic bottles. Our PET bottles will biodegrade in anaerobic (no oxygen, no light) and aerobic compostable environments.” The demand for plastic bottles is growing over 12 per cent annually. PET plastic bottling is being used for everything from food, personal care to cleaning products and the demand for plastic beverage bottles continues to grow. ENSOs' biodegradable plastic products provide a solution to one of our growing environmental problems. Clark says, "The world is changing, people are becoming more involved and at ENSO we want to be part of making this a better planet for us and future generations." Visit http://ensobottles.com

Real Xmas trees greener than fake ones Jan 2009

A natural Christmas tree may have more than just smell on its side — it also emits fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than an artificial one, a new study has found. Sustainable development firm ellipsos inc. conducted an independent Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) that concluded natural Christmas trees generate 3.1 kg of GHG emissions per year, compared to 8.1 kg of GHGs emitted by artificial ones. Jean-Sébastien Trudel, president of ellipsos and co-author of the study, said the findings challenge the common belief that artificial trees are better because they can be reused year after year. The LCA method considers the tree's environmental impact throughout its life cycle, from the extraction of raw materials to what happens to the tree after it's used. The LCA follows the recognized ISO 14040 and 14044 standards and was reviewed by an independent third-party of peers. An artificial tree has to be reused for at least 20 years before it can have the same environmental effect as a natural one. But on average, artificial trees are only kept for six years, the study said. Trudel said the difference in GHG emissions between the two types of trees is insignificant compared to bigger polluters, like vehicles. He pointed out that one could offset the carbon emissions of either tree by carpooling or biking to work just one to three days a year. The study is available online at: http://www.ellipsos.ca/modules/content/?id=24