If we determine that our licensed technologies are commercially viable and
we are able to raise a significant amount of additional capital, we may be in
a position to begin to license and/or enter into long-term contracts with municipalities,
solid waste haulers, and operators of landfills and materials recovery facilities
to process a large portion of their waste streams into biomass and recyclable
materials.
Energy/Chemicals
We expect the primary product we will sell will be biomass from our Biomass
Recovery Process to be used for conversion to energy or chemical products. We
believe our potential biomass product can be used in multiple varieties of energy
production systems. We expect the uses for our biomass product to potentially
expand as new energy production technologies are developed.
MSW Processing Services
We believe that the opportunity to help communities, haulers and landfill managers
reduce the amount of material transported and deposited in landfills is large
and growing. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1991, referred to
as RCRA, requires landfills to install expensive liners and other equipment
to control leaching toxics. Due to the increased costs and expertise required
to manage landfills under RCRA, many small, local landfills closed during the
1990’s. Larger regional landfills were built requiring increased transportation
costs for the waste haulers. As a result, landfill space is increasingly scarce
and disposal costs have been increasing.
Currently, landfill operators charge a tipping fee to deliver MSW to a landfill,
waste-to-energy facility, recycling facility, transfer station or similar facility.
Tipping fees vary widely based on geographic location and the number of available
places to dispose of MSW in a given location. Because of the increasing cost
pressures on waste haulers and based on current tipping fee pricing, we believe
we will be able to negotiate a payment of part of their tipping fee from waste
haulers who deliver MSW to us for processing that would range from as low as
$15 per ton in some central parts of the country to over $90 per ton in the
Northeast and parts of the Southeast. The availability of tipping fees at favorable
rates will be a key component of our business.
Recyclable Byproducts
We anticipate that our Biomass Recovery Process will generate other recyclable
byproducts from the processing of MSW, such as aluminum, metals, tin, steel,
glass and plastic (typically 20 to 25 percent of the total waste stream). The
markets for these recovered products are volatile and subject to rapid and unpredictable
market changes making it impossible at this time to provide estimated per ton
cost to revenue information.
