#9 Fiberight: Secures the Stash to Unlock the Cash in Trash
This week we reported that Fiberight has secured $70 million for a municipal solid waste center that should be in operation by this May. The high-tech facility will convert 180,000 tons of trash each year from more than 100 Maine towns into biofuel at a 144,000-square-foot steel frame facility that began construction last July.
The underlying facility is what’s known as a Dirty MRF, or materials recovery facility. That’s where the receiving happens and the sortation begins — and the process of recovering value back from the waste stream begins.
The bottom line data point for this project — indeed, any project utilizing municipal solid waste as a feedstock for advanced fuels, chemicals or materials — is that the old model of sorting waste into metals, plastics and organics and then combusting organics into electricity is broken. Technically it works, but it can’t make money, and communities face choices between more landfills, long-term subsidies to support waste-to-electrons financial losses, or utilizing advanced technology to extract more value.
The key opportunity in MSW is that 50 percent of MSW is the organic fraction — and Fiberight has found a financial model that works in upgrading this waste stream into biogas, which can be utilized in the higher-value CNG market among other places. As a renewable transport fuel based on cellulosic material, it also qualifies for valuable cellulosic RIN credits.
https://staging.biofuelsdigest.com/2018/01/08/fiberight-a-deep-dive-into-the-trash-to-find-the-cash/
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