Making money from old rope – or indeed any waste product – has long been something of a Holy Grail in manufacturing. It’s a safe bet that future generations will despair at how long it has taken to come up with a means of using rubbish as an energy source. There’s gold in them thar hills of landfill waste – literally. As well as the gold, a considerable proportion of the electronics goods alone that are thrown away contain silver, precious metals and rare earth.
Unfortunately, the quantities of these materials in any one device are very small, so the trick lies in accessing them. The combined worth in a landfill site may run into attractive multi-digit dollar values in a single location, and into billions globally, but so too does the cost of developing and maintaining efficient means of extraction.
However, the unpleasant smell of a landfill site indicates something much more easily and immediately accessible: gas. Given the rate at which landfill sites are being filled, this could reasonably be considered a renewable energy source.
Toyota has recently announced that it is converting landfill gas to manufacturing energy at its Georgetown, Kentucky plant. Toyota’s largest plant outside Japan currently builds the Toyota Camry and Avalon ranges, the Venza and engines. The Lexus ES 350 will be added in 2015, when the landfill gas system is also scheduled to become operational. The OEM claims the power generated from landfill gas will be sufficient to build 10,000 cars annually.
Toyota is not the first OEM to use landfill gas in vehicle production. Together, GM’s Orion (Chevrolet Sonic, Buick Verano) and Fort Wayne (Chevrolet Silverado, GMC Sierra) plants use landfill gas power to save 89,000 metric tons of CO2 manufacturing emissions, equivalent to the greenhouse gas output of 18,542 cars. GM also saves US$10m in energy costs across the two facilities. Since the early 2000s, BMW has been using landfill gas to power manufacturing at Spartanburg. The South Carolina plant is becoming the centre of production for BMW’s SUV range, and current expansion plans will shortly see it become the OEM’s largest plant globally, with output of over 400,000 upa. And in Mexico, Nissan is working with ENER-G to source gas from a landfill site close to its Aguascalientes plant (Nissan March, Versa, Note, Sentra and Frontier) to power its manufacturing there. 2.475 MW of clean energy are delivered to Nissan, which it says is sufficient to produce 37,000 vehicles per year.
Landfill site operators have for some time used the waste gases to power on-site operations; piping it off-site to local manufacturing facilities for commercial gain is a new, but growing business strategy.
At present, OEMs’ efforts focus on converting gas to manufacturing energy. The next step could be to use it to power cars. Some landfill gas is already being used in the production of biomethane which, once processed, can be used in CNG and LNG as a transport fuel.
That unpleasant landfill smell? That’s the smell of money and green energy.
