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Friday, June 29, 2012
Plastic scraps fuel business for Falls recycler
by David Bertola, Buffalo Business First Reporter
A Niagara Falls company is turning a river of plastic waste into a stream of low-sulphur fuels.
Plastic is the feedstock for JBI Inc., a $2.5 million company that takes material that would otherwise end up in landfills and converts it to clean fuels.
John Bordynuik, who founded the company in 2006 and is chief of technology, describes the process simply: “You put plastic in one end and liquid fuel comes out the other.”
Three years ago, JBI began with a 1-gallon reactor. In 2010, a machine was built that could process 20 tons per day. To date, JBI has converted 2 million pounds of plastic to fuel.
According to EPA statistics, 31 million tons of plastic waste were generated in 2010, and only 8 percent of total plastic waste generated that year was recovered for recycling.
John Holko, a board member of the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York, said the process of converting plastic to fuel has potential because the United States has an excess of refined product but not an abundance of raw materials.
“What (JBI’s process) does is it uses another stream of raw materials to make fuel. And that changes the game completely,” Holko said.
The Niagara Falls plant has two massive steel processors, each of which cover 1,200 square feet. There also is a 7,200-square-foot building adjacent to it that was just built for about $500,000. It will run on a 275-kilowatt generator, powered by natural gas JBI manufactures itself.
Three more processors will be housed there. A single unit can produce a range of fuel products that don’t need further refining. They include diesel, petroleum distillate, light naphtha and gases such as methane, ethane, butane and propane.
Customers include cardboard manufacturer Rock-Tenn Co., Coco Paving Inc., Ontario Automotive Recyclers Association, Chrysler Group LLC and General Motors Co. All buy fuels or deliver plastic waste to JBI.
Plastic scrap
On a seven-acre site on Iroquois Street, truckloads of unwashed plastic are dropped off all the time. Picking through a giant white bag of it, Bordynuik plucks out a blue plastic wrapper for turkey breast. This may have been misprinted, he said, or maybe on a product that had gone bad.
His phone rings off the hook from those looking for a place to dump waste just like this, and he’s happy to tell them how to find JBI.
About 40 percent of those that drop off are from Western New York. But truckloads come in from Ontario and as far away as Mississippi.
“Companies are now being more environmentally responsible, and if they have packaging that will only go to a landfill, they might look for other resources to get rid of it,” he said.
Toward the end of 2010, JBI had a dozen employees. But there’s been a demand for more product, so Bordynuik is building more plastic converters. This was aided in May when he closed on $10 million in funding from investors.
The company, based in Thorold, Ont., is publicly traded. Bordynuik wouldn’t say whether the plant is profitable, only that expanded production would help in that regard.
Plan: Operate units at other sites
The Niagara Falls site runs three shifts and employs 50. The company operates a fuel-blending site and a recycling facility in Thorold that employs 15. At the fuel-blending site, Bordynuik said his company could manufacture gasoline using naphtha it makes.
The economics of recovering fuel is a challenge for companies such as JBI, said Holko, a petroleum engineer.
“If they are on target and can do this, and the economics are there, their raw-material supply, waste plastic, is huge in this country,” he said.
JBI’s plans also call for fuel processors to be operated on-site at places such as carpet manufacturers or paper mills, which produce a lot of waste plastic that can be converted to fuel. But there are no plans to sell a system to such a place. Instead, Bordynuik said, JBI would own and operate all processors.
Bordynuik said as a growing company, he and his staff wore many hats and his time was best spent on the technology. So others have been hired to run the company.
In December CFO Matthew Ingham joined the company, and Kevin Rauber was hired in May as CEO and president. On June 27, Tony Bogolin was hired as COO.
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