In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESSES AT THE ECOCOMPLEX INCUBATOR

In Business, May-June, 2006, Vol. 28, No. 3, p. 18

Projects at the Rutgers University EcoComplex include a landfill gas-powered greenhouse, an aquaponics system and various educational and commercial enterprises.

Cindy Rovins

THE RUTGERS UNIVERSITY EcoComplex - a research facility of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station - is located at the Burlington County Resource Recovery Center where a greenhouse heated and powered by landfill gas is operated. The EcoComplex serves as a sustainable business incubator, with innovative businesses and nonprofit organizations conducting research in both the greenhouse and the EcoComplex building. In Business first covered the EcoComplex in the March/April 2005 issue (“Incubating Firms At An Ecocomplex). This update will highlight new initiatives being undertaken, as well as developments at the incubator.
The greenhouse is home to an aquaponics system that grows hydroponic vegetables and herbs fertilized by water from tanks raising tilapia. Research on this system continues, looking at ways to maximize efficiency.
The 46,000 square foot greenhouse has plenty of room for new businesses that have taken up residence. A company from Israel, Organi-Tech, is testing an automated hydroponic lettuce production system and looking to enter the lettuce market in New York and Philadelphia.
Four Seasons is an orchid growing company based in Taiwan, literally testing the climate for potted orchid production in the Northeast U.S. Dave Specca, EcoComplex Director, sees the benefit of these companies ultimately locating their facilities in the region and working with local greenhouse growers to produce the crops. “We're interested in getting them to locate right along the edge of the landfill where they could utilize the waste heat from the county's cogeneration (cogen) system,” says Specca. “They'd have to put up their own greenhouse, but they could do that with the confidence of knowing that we've already demonstrated that it can be done on a small scale in our greenhouse.”
As a side note, in order to site private operations at county or municipal facilities that were bought with tax-free municipal bonds - which have restrictions on the amount of private activity that can occur - Burlington County had to refinance some of its project costs with taxable bonds and pay off other bonds.
Another new occupant in the greenhouse is Elam Botanical Research, Inc., which is exploring hydroponically growing medicinal herbs for nutraceutical use.
The last addition to the greenhouse is the nonprofit Ocean of Know organization, running its Young McDonald's Farm distance learning program. Using a small model of the EcoComplex's aquaponics system, they teach math and science to inner city school children in New York City and other locations. Under the premise that students learn much quicker when the math and science are applied, the project involves video-conferencing that allows the students to tie into the greenhouse over the Internet and interact live with a technician who walks them through the project.
The project, however, is not just a guided tour. Student teams are given the responsibility of calculating the correct feeding, monitoring water quality (dissolved solids, oxygen, pH, etc.), keeping records of findings, making changes in the care routine based on their findings, and reporting the findings. Based on their calculations, students remotely instruct a robot (built and programmed by the students) to feed the fish. The classes involved in the project also make two field trips to the greenhouse where they get to plant and then harvest their crops. (For more information about Ocean of Know, go to: http://www.oceanofk.org.)

ESTABLISHED INCUBATOR COMPANIES

Acrion Technologies, Inc.
Since the completion of the pilot project running two trash trucks on landfill gas cleaned up by Acrion's landfill gas (LFG) clean-up system, Acrion's technology is being implemented in the first commercial sized facility. Firm GreenSM Energy, Inc. of Newport Beach, California, has licensed the LFG clean-up technology. The Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio (SWACO) is developing a Green Energy Center where it will sell its LFG to Firm Green Fuels (an LLC of Firm Green Energy), who will clean the gas through the Acrion process, and use it for fuel cells and/or microturbines to produce electricity for both Firm Green Fuels and SWACO's facilities.
SWACO also will utilize Acrion's process to produce methanol and food grade carbon dioxide. According to Bill Brown, Acrion's cofounder, “What will allow the LFG to be used in making methanol is to clean it up to very strict standards. What we don't want to do is poison the catalysts needed to convert the methane and CO2 into methanol. For methanol synthesis it is the chlorine and sulfur-containing contaminants that poison the catalysts. Our process produces a very clean mixture of methane and CO2 which is then used as a feedstock to synthesize methanol in a catalytic process.”
Adds Brown: “We've licensed the technology to Mack Truck for the manufacturing of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from LFG and all other applications have been licensed to Firm Green.”

TerraCycle
TerraCycle produces a liquid plant food from vermicompost, packaged in reused soda bottles. Its research operation takes place at the EcoComplex greenhouse, while processing and packaging are done in a facility in Trenton, New Jersey. They are converting another building in Trenton to use as a vermicomposting facility.
It seems that vermicompost is as good for growing a business as it is for growing plants. Since early 2004, TerraCycle Plant Food has sold for about $7 in natural foods stores and independent garden shops, and became available in Wal-Marts across Canada and on-line at Home Depot. Sales in 2005 reached $500,000, and are anticipated to triple this year with a planned launch in Home Depot stores and U.S. Wal-Marts.
Terracycle has expanded its line to 10 products, including an African violet plant food and an orchid plant food. It continues to obtain used soda bottle containers through school collection programs. In the quest for making its packaging completely environmentally friendly, the company was looking at producing labels from corn-based polymers. Instead, it is looking to go with a label made from PET, which would make the packaging entirely recyclable.

Garden State Ethanol
Garden State Ethanol, Inc. may be the first ethanol plant on the East Coast, and is intended to be built as an EcoAgribusiness Park with aquaculture, a flash freeze process and greenhouse production using cooperative energy and infrastructure utilization. After being outbid on the original property selected, Garden State Ethanol has identified two brownfield sites that meet its requirements for access to major roadways, rail and a water supply. While the final site is to be determined, funding for the project has been secured. New Jersey State Senator (now Governor) Corzine got a $1 million grant to assist Garden State Ethanol in the construction costs for the facility.
The overall outlook for ethanol looks promising as well, with federal calls for more ethanol production. New Jersey will be putting into effect a ban on MTBE in January 2008, so a million gallons a day of an MTBE alternative will be needed. According to Project Director Hank Capro, “the viable commercial alternative at this stage of the game is ethanol.” Capro also notes that E85 is a potential fuel for consumers. “Ford, GM and Volkswagen all have millions of E85 vehicles on the market - they're heavily utilized in the Midwest,” he says.
As Garden State Ethanol gets closer to the realities of production, it will determine whether to go with its original plan of selling the by-product dry distiller's grains as animal feed or, depending on the price of natural gas, use them along with waste wood as fuel in a fluidized bed gasifier to generate steam and electricity.

HydroGlobe
HydroGlobe develops and produces adsorptive materials for removal of heavy metals and arsenic from drinking and process water. Since graduating from the EcoComplex and being acquired by Graver Technologies, the company has invested significantly in the technology through testing and improvements in the past year.
The groundwork for the product development and marketing has been in anticipation of EPA's arsenic standard for drinking water which went into effect January 23, 2006. The new standard for arsenic is 10 parts per billion to protect consumers served by public water systems from the effects of long-term, chronic exposure.

Cindy Rovins is an Agricultural and Environmental Communications Editor for Rutgers Cooperative Research & Extension.

Sidebar:

NORTH AMERICAN BIOFUELS UPDATE

ORIGINALLY SLATED for the incubator at the EcoComplex, North American Biofuels Company, Inc. (NABFC) has instead accelerated its schedule for building new plants due to the dynamics of the price of oil in the marketplace and the demand for alternative fuels. “Rather than invest the time in incubation, the plant sites will serve as demonstration sites as the technology matures,” says Alan Ellenbogen of NABFC.
NABFC has a chemically driven process that produces biodiesel from grease trap waste. The process has been validated by a third-party engineering firm that certified more than a dozen of its batches. An independent evaluation also was performed on its process by Shaw Engineering. This certification is the first step in NABFC's plans for establishing large-scale plants at two locations in New Jersey. “We are in discussions and negotiations with several wastewater treatment plants (WWTP), since getting rid of the wastewater (grey water) during the initial dewatering is much more convenient at a WWTP,” says Ellenbogen. “Also, this provides revenue in the form of tipping fees to the plant, and yet there is no danger of waste grease getting into the system since we take it.”
Under consideration in their discussions with the regional WWTP's is keeping the biodiesel within the region to satisfy the need for municipalities to have green energy for their fleet vehicles.
Along with the progress in New Jersey, its pilot plant in Bohemia, New York on Long Island, located at the Russell Reid facility, is going through various upgrades. A large front-end system that will process all the brown grease coming in is being installed. They found that their initial process removed 70 percent of the water, but another 15 to 20 percent of the water was trapped in the grease layer. Says NABFC's CEO David Butler, “We would start the chemical process and the water would separate out and kill the process. So we had to learn to reprocess the trap grease to take that water out.” The new front end, which takes up half the size of a Sea-Land container, will effectively remove all the water, debris and surfactants from the trap grease.
The company is experimenting with a variety of different types of products such as fish oil, grease trap waste, vitamin manufacturing waste and “white grease” from donut manufacturing. The final product is an aggregate. “When taking multiple feedstocks, we're very careful that our final output is a blend of multiple sources,” says Butler. “So nobody will get a truckload of biodiesel from donut fat. They'll get it from a little soy, a little Chinese restaurant waste, a little beef lard, etc.” This is accomplished through common rail manifolds running across the wall which allow them to take different source tanks and blend them together into a final tank. “All of our biodiesel is consistent when it goes out because we control the input feedstocks,” says Butler. “We control all our venting; there are no air or water emissions - nothing goes out that is not a sellable product.”
The Long Island pilot plant currently is capable of producing 3,000 gallons/day of biodiesel. When the new front-end installation is complete, pilot production capacity will increase to 12,000 to 15,000 gallons/day.