Selling companies on the power of trash

IST Energy sees a big future for its onsite waste-conversion system

WALTHAM - Fans of "Back to the Future" might say that IST Energy Corp.'s latest invention, a portable system to turn trash into environmentally friendly electricity and gas heat, channels the refuse-powered DeLorean sports car driven in the popular sci-fi movie trilogy.

That's not a bad comparison, said Stu Haber, chief executive of the Waltham waste-to-energy company that created the garbage-guzzling Green Energy Machine system, or GEM, which was scheduled to be unveiled today.

Haber said his company hopes to start demonstrating the $850,000 system to potential customers - he hopes they'll include the Prudential Center in Boston, the Town of Lincoln, and several universities - this month.

"A dream would be that we could put this in someone's car," Haber said. "But that's somewhere between unrealistic and a really long time off."

What the GEM can do is cleanly power a 200,000-square-foot office building with more than 500 people, Haber said. And the payback period is only three to four years, he added.

But the benefits go beyond the buildings being powered by the system, according to the company. While producing clean energy, the machine diverts garbage from landfills. That, IST Energy officials said, should help cut a typical company's waste-disposal and energy costs by an estimated $250,000 a year while reducing greenhouse gas emissions from garbage by 540 tons annually.

IST Energy, a subsidiary of the engineering services firm Infoscitex Corp., originally developed GEM for the Army - a way to dispose of trash while powering field kitchens and other operations. "They needed something compact, portable, something young, inexperienced people could handle," Haber said.

Ultimately, the company designed a waste-to-energy system that can fit into a standard 30-foot-long shipping container. The GEM, Haber added, works by shredding and drying up to three tons of trash a day, squishing the waste into something resembling wood pellets, then converting the pellets into about 120 kilowatts of electricity and 240 kilowatts of heat through a gasification process.

"We're talking about anything that's combustible, but specifically paper, plastics, food, wood, and agricultural material," Haber said of what can be fed into a GEM. "The machine can handle other things, like glass and metal, but there's no energy content in glass or metal."

The idea behind the GEM isn't new.

In 2007, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, there were 87 working municipal waste-to-energy facilities in the United States, capable of converting more than 94,000 tons of trash a day into energy through a combustion process. Most of the facilities were in the Northeast.

The latest numbers from the EPA show that in 2007 about 13 percent of the 254 million tons of refuse generated by Americans was turned into energy.

Massachusetts has six waste-to-energy plants capable of burning between 360 and 3,000 tons of trash daily, said James Doucett, a state Department of Environmental Protection official. The six plants, Doucett added, handle about 50 percent of the refuse in Massachusetts that is not recycled.

But two things about the GEM system make it unique, Doucett said. First, it converts trash to energy through gasification rather than by burning. Second, because it fits into a shipping container, the system can be transported and used almost anywhere.

"One of the interesting ideas that IST has is that this could be distributed waste management - that the trash could be managed at the facility generating it instead of having a trash truck come and take it away," Doucett said.

Because waste-to-energy systems are still relatively uncommon, however, environmentalists and others are monitoring them for potential issues and cost-effectiveness, said Fred Mayes of the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the US Department of Energy. He said systems such as the GEM, which does its work in an enclosed area, have some observers excited.

"What happens is you get out of it almost no harmful pollutants because the system is closed - that's a huge potential advantage," Mayes said.

Still, he cautioned that there is currently little public information available on how such systems work, making it difficult for watchdogs to conduct inspections and analyses.

Doucett, meanwhile, said that IST Energy has applied to the state environmental agency for a demonstration project permit, which would allow the company to show its product to potential customers.

That permit would give state environmental officials a chance to check out GEM, too.

"Looking at a demonstration project allows us to look at these issues: how well it works, how the gas burns, what emissions are," Doucett said.

Erin Ailworth can be reached at eailworth@globe.com.