Committee investigates proposal to turn garbage into electricity

The Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency board on Tuesday created a committee to investigate the legal and financial ramifications of sending Cedar Rapids and Marion garbage to a proposed power plant that will run largely on natural gas but also will use plasma-arc technology to zap garbage into syngas.

The mix of gases, about 19 percent of which will be syngas under one scenario, will generate electricity.

The power plant, like no other in the United States, would be built by Plasma Power LLC, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., at a cost of between $105 million and $172 million, Jim Juranitch, co-founder and president/CEO of the company, told the Solid Waste Agency Board on Tuesday afternoon.

Juranitch was joined by the company's co-founder and chairman, Richard Tarrant, a wealthy former software company owner who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in Vermont in 2006.

Juranitch, who spoke to the Cedar Rapids City Council earlier this month, and Tarrant plan to build their power plant in Marion, and the Marion City Council has endorsed their plan and have provided the company with a $95,000 good-faith grant.

Plasma Power's most formidable hurdle is to obtain financing to build the Marion plant, and Juranitch said the company needs a commitment of garbage for the plant in order to make its case for financing.

His specific request was for the Solid Waste Agency board to agree to let Cedar Rapids and Marion garbage trucks take their garbage to the power plant and not to the agency's Site 2 landfill at County Home Road and Highway 13 on Marion's border. Along with the garbage, the agency would not collect its $38-a-ton tipping fee to put the garbage in the landfill, the power plant would collect the money.

The landfill actually takes in 600 tons of garbage a day, with about 500 tons of it coming from private haulers who will take their garbage where the price is best.

Agency board member Charlie Kress of Marion, a member of the group wastenotIOWA that has supported plasma-arc technology for several years, asked the agency board on Tuesday to approve a resolution to send 100 tons of garbage to the plant, which is roughly the amount collected in Cedar Rapids and Marion.

Instead, the board established a three-member committee of Tom Podzimek, Cedar Rapids City Council member and new chairman of the agency board, Kress and Pat Ball, Cedar Rapids' utilities director, to get answers in the next month to lingering legal and financial questions.

Brent Oleson, a Linn County supervisor from Marion and outgoing agency chairman, said he hoped the committee and the staff helping it took on the issue with an open mind, not with a “no-because” mind-set but with one that said, “what do we have to do” to accomplish this.

Ball and Mark Jones, solid waste manager for the city of Cedar Rapids, noted that only about $17 a ton of the agency's $38-a-ton tipping fee goes to pay for the landfill. The rest of the money supports recycling, composting and the handling of hazardous materials and electronics.

By diverting the agency's $38-a-ton tipping fee along with the garbage to Plasma Power, who will pay for the agency's other programs? Ball and Jones asked.

Juranitch said the new power plant would still recycle.

He said the problem with establishing a viable plasma-arc facility in the United States has come because the emphasis has been on putting such facilities in large metropolitan areas with a huge supply of garbage. However, the plant in Marion will be driven largely by natural gas, which allows the smaller plasma-arc facility incorporated in it to blend syngas with natural gas and so use the same cost-effective turbines to generate electricity, he said.

He hoped to have the plant up and running in two to three years, he said.