A private landfill and recycling facility on the Waianae Coast is looking to provide fuel that can power up to 12,000 homes in Hawaii with construction debris sorted by a new machine.
The PVT Land Co. will host a blessing ceremony at 10 a.m. Wednesday for its new recycling machine in Nanakuli, which the company designed and built.
Approximately 1,775 tons of construction or demolition debris enters the 135-acre facility daily. PVT Land charges a minimum of $45 per ton for dumping. It then recycles more than half of the debris for feedstock, or burnable material, to use in renewable energy production.
Feedstock can be wood, plastic, paper, cloth and other materials.
The materials are transformed into a fuel that can be burned to create steam to drive turbines in some of Oahu’s power plants or can be used in a manufacturing process that burns the feedstock to produce synthetic natural gas, PVT Land said.
"We don’t buy oil; we produce it out of our own trash," said Steve Joseph, vice president of operations for PVT Land.
"The importance of renewable fuel for us is tremendous," he said. "Every dollar that we spend for either solar, wind, renewable energy like this, geothermal or wave, every dollar stays here in our economy."
The recycling machine that PVT Land set up in September allows the company to produce larger quantities of feedstock to supply gasification facilities to create power for the electrical grid. The company recently finished getting the system up to standards to produce on a large scale for interested companies.
"We’re ready right now to start producing," Joseph said.
PVT Land plans to supply power generators that would use the feedstock to provide energy for Hawaiian Electric Co., the company said.
PVT Land has signed an agreement to supply feedstock to a gasification facility in development called Honua Power LLC. PVT Land is working on feedstock agreements with several other local companies, Joseph said.
Once operating at full capacity, the PVT recycling system can process up to 900 tons of feedstock a day to fuel energy production, enough to power 12,000 homes, according to PVT Land.
About 200 tons of feedstock a day from the facility can make the equivalent to 200,000 drums of oil annually, Joseph said.
"We produce about 75 to 80 tons an hour for renewable energy," Joseph said. "We take out anything they don’t want to burn or gasify, then they go ahead and run it through, and they supply power to HECO and they supply power to the rest of the island."
The company has been separating feedstock for two years in small amounts. The new system allows the company to triple its feedstock production, Joseph said.
"After the small piece of equipment, we worked with our engineer to come up with this design," Joseph said. "We learned how to crawl, and now we can walk and run with this thing."
