Team Gemini’s waste-to-energy project

This is a fabulous story;  what an amazing facility.  No doubt we will get down there and cover the opening.

Waste-to-energy is game-changing technology and getting built on small to very large sizes.  It solves so many problems.  One of the great applications is to use it on farms, even smaller scale.

Look at the number of jobs produced by this project...what a great example of the booming green economy.

Team Gemini’s waste-to-energy project near SWACO grows to $420M

by Carrie Ghose                                                                                                  

                             

A Florida development company plans to start construction soon on a $420 million green energy and recycling industrial park with a long-term goal to divert all the waste going to the Franklin County landfill.

The cost of the privately financed project has grown by one-third since Orlando-based Team Gemini LLC first announced its contract with the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio in January.

“We increased the scale,” said Team Gemini co-founder Doug Haughn, a Grove City native. 

The first part of the interconnected project is a $160 million waste-sorting facility on 22 acres adjacent to the Franklin County Landfill on the south side of London Groveport Road. When it opens at the end of 2015, trucks will dump commercial and eventually municipal waste at the Center of Resource Recovery and Recycling instead of directly in the landfill. Recyclable material will be pulled from the loads and bundled for sale. Until the rest of the park is built, the rest goes to the landfill, so at first the facility will focus on loads from businesses that are almost all cardboard and paper.

The next phase is the $260 million Gemini Synergy Center, on 340 acres north of London Groveport Road, which will include a facility to sort and shred food and other non-recyclable waste and send it to energy plants that digest it into methane and compost or convert shredded plastic back to petroleum. Heat and steam from those processes will be used to lower operating costs on 1.7 million square feet of greenhouses and an indoor freshwater fish farm. Plans call for a bridge and conveyor system to send the trash across the street from the sorting facility, eliminating some truck traffic.

 Together the sorting, energy and greenhouse operations would have 560 permanent employees.

Similar models have been used in Europe for years but never to this scale in the United States, Haughn said in an interview before Thursday’s ceremonial groundbreaking.

“As a result of this project, Central Ohio will be the most sustainable community in North America,” said Dennis Hall, director of The Third Frontier-funded Ohio Bioproducts Innovation Center at Ohio State University, which has consulted on the project.