Fueling A Fleet

Mixed plastic scrap collected from residential and commercial customers will soon be converted into diesel fuel to power a fleet of solid waste and recycling collection trucks in the United Kingdom.

Earlier in 2011, Sita UK, a subsidiary of the France-based firm Suez Environnement, signed a technology agreement with United Kingdom-based Cynar Plc to build a plant in London to recycle mixed plastic scrap into diesel fuel. That plant is scheduled to be completed before the end of 2011.

According to Suez Environnement, the London plant is the first of 10 facilities planned for the United Kingdom. The company says the plants will handle a total of 60,000 metric tons of mixed plastic scrap each year.
 

A KEY CONVERSION
Cynar CEO Michael Murray says the company has developed a conversion technology process that has proven ideal at turning mixed plastics into diesel fuel.

Murray says Cynar first approached Sita in 2009 and, while the multi-national environmental company was intrigued by the idea right away, it also set about conducting its own extensive due-diligence research.

“They were relatively skeptical, and at the time of our first presentation we as a company were very embryonic,” says Murray. “But Sita was interested enough in the idea that it embarked on a 24-month around-the-world search. The company set a team up and looked at 12 other similar technologies around the world.”

As Sita was doing its research, Murray says Cynar stayed in touch with the company, informing Sita about how its technology was progressing.

“About 18 months after our initial presentation, we had commercialized our technology in Ireland and were applying it,” Murray says. “We had been in contact during that time with Sita, and they had watched us develop.” Ultimately, he says, Sita “whittled it down to a final three or four companies before making the decision to go ahead with us.”

Murray has been gratified to hear that Sita has promoted its use of the Cynar technology and has been willing to explain it to its own customers. “We were doing a joint presentation at one of their customers’ locations in April, and they were very clear in saying that they had lived through the journey, looked at everyone else offering a similar solution but that we had won out both because of our technology and because we were easy to deal with,” says Murray.

In making its initial announcement, David Palmer-Jones, chief executive of Sita UK, stated, “We are delighted to announce this landmark agreement with Cynar, which will see us provide a commercial solution to the environmental challenge of treating waste plastic that can’t be recycled.”

For Cynar’s part, Murray states in the news release announcing the agreement, “We are excited by the prospect of seeing our technology becoming both a manufacturing and mainstream reality and a market first. We believe Cynar has found an entrepreneurial partner in Sita UK who can help us ensure that the years of our research will be realized in the near future with vehicles running on plastic-derived diesel and ensuring that there is a practical commercial benefit derived from dealing with Britain’s growing mixed waste plastic mountain.”

The current plan is for Sita UK to build two or three plastic-to-diesel conversion plants each year, depending on market conditions. Each facility is designed to convert about 6,000 metric tons of mixed plastic into truck fuel per year.
 

DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS
Not all plastic scrap collected by Sita will head to Cynar’s scrap-to-fuel facilities.

“The Sita model identifies the ‘end-of-life’ plastic stream as the plastic that is not economically viable to keep in the recycling chain,” says Murray. “The Cynar technology can handle all plastics, but for different reasons PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and PVC (polyvinyl chloride) will not be included,” he continues. “PET is always taken out of the stream because of its value, and the PVC we tend not to see in [household collections].”

Among the materials likely to head to the Cynar London facility and to subsequent plants will be polyethylene (PE) other than marketable No. 1 or No. 2 containers, polypropylene (PP) and polystyrene (PS). Samples taken by Cynar and Sita in its research have found a mix of about 50 percent PE, 40 percent PP and about 10 percent PS by volume.

While much of the mixed plastic heading into the scrap-to-fuel facilities will have been collected from households, Sita UK also collects lower-value plastics from commercial customers. That stream also has been examined to determine what is cost-effective (and energy-efficient) to recycle and what may be better suited for the scrap-to-fuel application.

“We started by identifying what is now going into landfill, and in Europe a lot of it is post-domestic [residential] material,” Murray says. “Most of the commercial scrap can be recycled, so we don’t want to put material that can be effectively recycled through our systems—it’s really to focus on what’s going to landfill. But in theory, it can take lower-grade commercial films or other material that may not have a good market.”
 

GOALS AND BENEFITS
The plan conceived by Sita UK and Cynar will reap benefits for Sita in many ways, Murray says.

The cost of deploying the technology will be kept in check in part because of the small footprint required by Cynar’s conversion process. “In the Sita scenario, putting plants onto the back of an existing MRF (material recovery facility) requires a space 34 meters (112 feet) by 15 meters (49 feet) for the equipment,” says Murray. The number and size of storage tanks for fuel can be a variable, he adds.

The potential volume of fuel that can be produced by the process may well meet Sita’s in-house collection fleet needs well before 10 plants are constructed. “Sita has 1,800 diesel vehicles and the company estimates that five of the plants will satisfy this fuel need,” says Murray.

Any additional capacity can help further turn the Sita-Cynar plants into a profit center for Sita. That will be especially profitable should the cost of oil remain near or above $100 per barrel, he notes. “We’re producing a gallon of diesel fuel for $1.80; it’s a significant savings for the client of ours in Ireland.”

And the profitability comes without a sacrifice in performance, he says. “Cynar has a lot of data on the fuel’s mileage and performance,” Murray says. “Trucks run better on this. Drivers have noted they don’t have to, on certain hills, drop a gear as they used to. Tailpipe emissions are very much reduced because there is no sulfur.”
 

"Most of the commercial scrap can be recycled, so we don’t want
to put material that can be effectively recycled through our
systems—it’s really to focus on what’s going to landfill."
– Michael Murray, CEO, Cynar

Sita is viewing the Cynar technology as a way to handle materials that have been problematic to recycle, as a source of fuel for its company fleet, as a potential revenue generator through the sale of excess diesel fuel and ideally as a way to ensure the public that it has found a good solution for what had been a recycling-related problem.

An opportunity for the company to tout its new solution will come in the form of the 2012 Summer Olympics, to be held in London. Mid-2012 is an important target date for Sita, Murray says, because “Sita has been awarded the London Olympics waste contract, and the mayor wants their collection trucks operating on [recycled-content] fuel.”

Should the Sita UK arrangement work as planned, Murray appears optimistic that similar opportunities can follow in other parts of the world. Already, Sita and its parent company Suez have rights to the technology in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden (in addition to the United Kingdom), he notes.

Murray attended WasteExpo in Dallas in part, he says, because “Cynar is actively seeking strategic relationships in the United States, Canada, Middle East and the rest of Europe.”