New Bedford Waste to manufacture fuel briquette from recyclables

By Katie Fletcher | November 04, 2014

New Bedford Waste Services LLC, a sister company of ABC Disposal Service Inc., is building a commodity, municipal solid waste (MSW) recycling and Eco-Tac briquette manufacturing facility in New Bedford, Massachusetts. This facility will be known as Zero Waste Solutions LLC with anticipated construction completion in May or June of 2015.

NBWS currently has a 48,000 square-foot, $8.5 million MSW and construction and demolition (C&D) recycling plant and transfer station in Rochester, Massachusetts, known as the Rochester Environmental Park. This plant is permitted to accept 1,500 tons of MSW and C&D debris per day. The planned 103,000 square-foot ZWS operation will be built at the Rochester Environmental Park in the same building as NBWS’s C&D transfer station.

Solar power is amongst features of the ZWS facility, with an 80,000 square-foot installation of solar panels expected on the roof. “This facility will be able to achieve 90 percent plus recycling rate, which is obviously high,” said Michael Camara, president of ABC Disposal Service and NBWS.

In addition to accepting MSW, residential and commercial construction debris and recyclables, the facility will make a solid-fuel recycling product. The facility will use WERC-2 Inc.’s process to produce Eco-Tac fuel briquettes, a solid biomass fuel substitute made from common elements of post-recycled refuse. Further, the EPA has given their stamp of approval on the product. “The Eco-Tac fuel briquette was approved by the EPA as a non-hazardous and non-solid waste fuel,” Camara said.

WERC-2 is a proprietary technology with three patents pending, according to Camara. The process develops a manufactured alternative fuel of recovered resource substitute for cofiring with coal or woody biomass. “It was developed with the idea of making a much cleaner burning fuel with high Btu value, and that would not absorb water,” Camara said.

The briquettes will be sold to biomass plants, coal burning facilities and cement kilns, Camara said.