Nearly 300 groups, with more than 2,600 participants, are registered to comb Mountain State main and back roads, picking up tons of trash.
Saturday’s statewide Adopt-A Highway spring cleaning should make our country roads much less cluttered. Nearly 300 groups, with more than 2,600 participants, are registered to comb Mountain State main and back roads, picking up tons of trash.
The annual spring cleanup is hosted by the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Division of Highways.
Terry Fletcher, the chief communications officer for the DEP, said volunteers will be provided with all necessary protective gear and pick up materials.
Fletcher said DEP is hoping to recruit more Adopt-A-Highway groups and members with the statewide event.
“We have a Youth Environmental Program that does a really great job with helping to promote this as well,” Fletcher said. “They’re talking to school groups and students across the state about ways they can join in and pitch in to help clean up their communities.”
Fletcher said tossed out trash is not just an eyesore – it’s an environmental hazard and a physical danger.
”This stuff that you throw out of your car, it’s gonna find its way into a stream,” he said. “It’s gonna find its way into people’s yards and into our forests, stuff that can cause all kinds of environmental issues and problems.”
Fletcher said a spring cleanup goal is to surpass the 68,000 pounds of trash removed from more than 800 miles of roadway last year.
Click here for information on how to get involved.
Today, most of our trash ends up in landfills. In the United States, we produce more than 200 million tons of trash every single year. But what if we could turn some of that trash into fuel? Well, it turns out a large portion of Berkeley, Jefferson, and Morgan County residents’ garbage is being turned into fuel as we speak – even if they may not realize it.
Emily Dyson opens a gallon sized Ziploc bag full of soft, confetti like material. It has no smell, and it looks kind of like colorful, shredded fabric. This stuff was garbage, but now it’s been broken down, cleaned and can be used as a fuel source.
Dyson is the Director of Science Research and Development, Director of Safety, and formerly the Construction Manager at Entsorga West Virginia – a new waste-to-energy facility located in Martinsburg.
Credit Liz McCormick / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Emily Dyson, Director of Science Research and Development at Entsorga West Virginia.
There are similar efforts to turn trash into energy elsewhere in the United States, but Entsorga West Virginia is the first in the country to use a unique technology called HEBioT, or high-efficiency biological treatment. It speeds up the process – turning trash to fuel in less than three weeks.
Entsorga’s technology senses and separates garbage to collect bio-mass, plastics and other carbon based materials. Then, through the use of large fans and mulch, yes mulch, the garbage is cleaned, composted, then separated and shredded, and can then be used as fuel.
Entsorga is based in Italy with 14 locations around the world. Its West Virginia plant is the first Entsorga facility in North America. It employs 14 full-time employees, ranging in salaries from $13 to $25 an hour. 13 of the 14 employees are West Virginia residents.
Credit Liz McCormick / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Apple Valley Waste’s garbage trucks drive up to these doors and are emptied inside. The doors are specially sealed to contain much of the garbage smells within the facility. The ladybug is Entsorga’s mascot.
Dyson said Entsorga’s technology will solve both waste and fuel problems but is only one piece of the puzzle.
“From a waste perspective, there’s not going to be one technology that’s going to solve the waste problems of the U.S. From a fuel perspective, there’s not going to be one fuel, one power source that’s going to fix the energy issues that we face here, but you might as well be using waste, because that’s a definite recyclable commodity. Everybody makes waste,” she said.
Dyson said nearly 80 percent of garbage that comes to Entsorga will be diverted from a landfill, and at least half of that will be turned into fuel – fuel that will be used at a local cement factory in Berkeley County. Entsorga’s fuel will also replace a portion of coal used there.
“It burns cleaner than coal. The cement plant will use up to 30 percent offset, or supplement of their coal,” she explained.
Credit Liz McCormick / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
This is what garbage becomes after the Entsorga process. This confetti-like material can be burned as a fuel source. It’s been shredded, cleaned and is safe to touch.
Entsorga West Virginia opened its doors in March 2019, and it’s having a considerable effect on lessening the amount of garbage going into a landfill.
Clint Hogbin, Chairman of the Berkeley County Solid Waste Authority, and who invited Entsorga to locate in West Virginia, said, in the month of April, the facility saw more than 1,000 tons of waste that either became fuel or was recycled at the Berkeley County Solid Waste Authority.
“That’s an immediate 10 percent landfill reduction in [Entsorga’s] first month; for the entire Eastern Panhandle,” Hogbin said. “If you add all the waste stream of the Eastern Panhandle, that’s in their first month; its immediate 10 percent landfill reduction.”
But, let’s back up. How does garbage become the fluffy stuff in that Ziploc bag? Here’s how it works…
Residents in Berkeley, Jefferson, and Morgan Counties take their garbage out to the curb once a week, like anywhere else. But only Apple Valley Waste customers see their trash sent to Entsorga.
The Entsorga facility sits just behind the Solid Waste Authority on 12 acres of land.
The garbage trucks are weighed, and then the contents are emptied into the Entsorga building.
After the trash is dropped off, Entsorga’s HEBioT technology begins its work. There’s no human intervention in the Entsorga process, just the employees who operate the machines and watch the monitors.
Credit Liz McCormick / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Garbage is spun inside a trommel to help sort out the various items.
A large screen shows multiple camera views of the machines at work — spinning, cleaning, or shredding the garbage.
Dyson said the waste will sit in what’s called the bio-oxidation hall for a couple weeks, while a large fan system sucks and blows air through the ventilation system.
“And that is what accelerates that composting because we’re drying that material out fast. What normally takes three to nine months, we’re doing in that 10 to 14, 16 days,” she said.
Mulch plays a big part of the ventilation process by absorbing and breaking down the garbage smells. It helps to clean and compost the trash that’ll eventually become fuel.
Credit Liz McCormick / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Mulch and large fans help to clean and compost the garbage as it is processed into fuel.
But getting Entsorga to locate in West Virginia has not been without its struggles. It took ten years to get all the permits cleared – in part because the facility was a brand new thing for the state.
And there was also some pushback from community members.
“The first public hearing, there was a lot of people, there was a lot of questions,” Dyson explained.
She said most of the concerns came from a lack of understanding about how the technology works.
“It’s hard to wrap your head around [the technology] unless you see it,” she said.
There was also some opposition by landfill companies.
“If you’re a landfill; if you’re a facility that’s going to lose a lot of intake because of this facility, you might be upset, and you might get involved and slow it down. So, we had some of that,” Clint Hogbin said.
Hogbin said the Eastern Panhandle needed a waste-to-energy facility, simply because of the rate at which the area is growing – to find an alternative to landfilling. And he said he hopes Entsorga West Virginia will be an example for the rest of the country.
“I’m hoping those solid waste decision makers will come to Martinsburg, visit the facility, and I’m hoping in that way, the ripple effect would be that West Virginia changes the direction of management of solid waste,” Hogbin said. “It might be nice to be first at something.”
Entsorga West Virginia’s fuel product is being utilized by one local cement plant in Martinsburg called Argos. Argos is also an Italian company.
But both Hogbin and Dyson say there are other cement companies who may contract with them in the future, and there’s the possibility that other companies may have an interest in the product.
A raft of garbage covers a swath of the Monongahela River in northern West Virginia, a dozen miles upstream from the drinking water intake for 100,000 people.
Old tires, damaged toys, algae, oil drums, sticks and other refuse have crowded against the dam for so long that weeds sprout from them. Stuck against the spillway, the trash spans a football field’s length from one bank to the other and spreads almost 30 yards upstream.
But the filth is no match for the Robert B. Creel Water Treatment Facility in Morgantown. The publicly owned plant routinely turns the dirty water into drinking water that far exceeds federal and state health standards, an approach that sets it apart from most systems in the U.S., according to the American Water Works Association. In addition to being safe, it won the association’s award for best-tasting West Virginia water in 2016.
It’s not cheap. The raw water from the Monongahela is treated in a system that was upgraded four years ago with a $40 million municipal bond. The project increased production capacity in Morgantown, the home of West Virginia University and one of the few areas in the state that’s been growing and water demand is projected to keep rising.
About 150 miles away is Charleston, where in 2014 a leaking chemical tank left about 300,000 people without water for roughly nine days. Even if a spill like that happened near Morgantown, its elite system wouldn’t have been able to filter out the chemical that spilled into the Elk River and fouled Charleston’s drinking water. But it does have sensors upstream that may have detected that something was amiss when the chemical leak started and could’ve closed its intake earlier, perhaps preventing people from losing their drinking water for days.
“From a health standpoint, Morgantown is going to be way better off than most utilities,” said Rob Renner, of the Water Research Foundation in Denver. “These membranes take more of the risk out.”
Renner is talking about membranes with microscopic openings that block most pathogens at the Morgantown facility.
That doesn’t mean the water elsewhere is unsafe to drink. It just has less assurance that it’s been properly filtered, so the risk that it contains contaminants is higher. Private utilities are reluctant to upgrade their systems the same way because of cost and regulations don’t require it. Morgantown was different because it’s publicly owned, and when its system needed to upgrade, engineers thought about safety and then the bottom line.
“I wish that would take hold in other places,” said Angie Rosser, of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition. “They’re showing their customers they are going above and beyond and instilling that confidence that we haven’t regained in Charleston.”
The disaster in Charleston spurred many utilities into action as they realized they couldn’t take clean drinking water for granted. West Virginia American Water in Charleston said it continued upgrading its source water monitoring and analysis last year and will add storage tanks and replace water mains in $29 million of system upgrades this year. It uses gravel, sand and charcoal filters.
The Morgantown board in December 2015 was the first system in West Virginia to publish its source water protection plan, required by state law after the Charleston spill, listing more than 16,000 potential sources of significant contaminants, including nearly 12,000 above ground storage tanks, about 2,000 abandoned mine lands and about 1,200 Marcellus Shale natural gas wells.
Under the Safe Drinking Water Act and 19 major regulations since the 1970s, drinking water systems have spent about $5 billion on upgrades to comply, Renner said. If every surface water treatment plant in the U.S. were to add membrane filtration like the one Morgantown has, it would probably cost billions of dollars, he said.
West Virginia’s Bureau of Public Health requires all the water systems for more than 1.5 million customers to test for many contaminants. The bureau issued almost 5,000 violation letters last year, though none to Morgantown. The bureau also sent out 26 permit suspension warning letters, with 11 permits temporarily suspended.
Patrick Murphy, environmental engineering director for the state, said 33 administrative orders setting timelines for fixing multiple violations were issued last year, representing 3 percent of the systems. “Generally the systems in West Virginia are doing well,” he said.
But the challenges from pollution are significant.
The Monongahela, which empties into the Ohio River at Pittsburgh, is on the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s list of “impaired” waterways. Garbage is a minor culprit. The leading polluter is fecal coliform, mostly from human waste. Next is iron, often from mining. Most lakes and many smaller streams lack enough data to tell if they’re impaired.
Engineers at the Morgantown treatment plant face mine drainage, bacteria, sewage, fertilizer, chemicals and other waste and pollution in the Monongahela.
After the waste enters quarter-inch intake screens tilted slightly downstream, the river water is pumped into sediment settling tanks, then through six levels of gravel and sand filters and then through the membranes. Chlorine, lime, carbon, alum and potassium permanganate are added to help purify the water, but closely monitored to try to limit the minute chemical byproducts of disinfection, some considered carcinogens.
Control room operators constantly monitor 2,000 data points by computers with alarms if they exceed normal parameters, treatment and production manager Greg Shellito said. They sample water throughout the system, and in his 30 years, have never had to issue a boil notice, he said.
“In this industry you have to be 100 percent correct 100 percent of the time,” plant manager Mike Anderson said. “What you do in this business is public health.”
Lawmakers in the House have approved a bill that would increase the penalties for littering in the state.
Littering on public or private property in West Virginia is already a misdemeanor, but House Bill 2303 increases the fines and community service hours associated with it.
Fines in the bill are subject to the amount of trash a person disposes of improperly and are decided by a judge. They range from 100 to ten thousand dollars. The maximum amount of community service hours also increases in the bill to 200 hours, with a minimum of 8 required.
Delegate Rupie Phillips of Logan County, the only Independent member of the state Legislature, is the lead sponsor of the littering bill. He said he feels the penalties are reasonable, but wishes they were even stronger.
“If I was in committee, I woulda stood stronger on a stiffer bottom dollar than where they went,” Phillips noted, “but like I said, we got a bill out, and it raised; the community service I mean, to go from just a few hours to possible 100 hours or possible 200 hours, I mean, just whatever. It’s just like I said, let’s just make West Virginia shine.”
Landfilling has been the main source of getting rid of waste for centuries. But a new technology coming to West Virginia may change how we think of waste disposal, and in the long run, help our environment.
Entsorga is an Italian resource recovery company that has been around since 1997. About four years ago, the Berkeley County Solid Waste Authority was looking for ways to promote a cleaner environment and find a safer and more efficient way to dispose of waste. …Entsorgaended up finding them.
After three years of waiting, Entsorga received approval from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection to begin constructing a new resource recovery facility later this year on property owned by the Berkeley County Solid Waste Authority. The facility will take anywhere from 65 to 75 percent of the refuse they collect and turn it into fuel instead of putting it in the ground.
“Essentially what you take waste, and you use it as a resource or you use to make energy,” said Clint Hogbin, the chairman of the Berkeley County Solid Waste Authority, “This is garbage that will be picked up on the street, no differently then it’s being picked up today. And instead of the truck going to a landfill, the truck will go to a 4 acre building, and unload its waste inside of a building, where mechanical equipment, electro-mechanical equipment will sort and process that waste and prepare it to be used for fuel.”
The Berkeley County facility will be the first Entsorga plant in the country and the first resource recovery facility in West Virginia using a technology called HeBIOT.
Credit Liz McCormick / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Acreage just behind the Berkeley County Solid Waste Authority’s main office. The Entsorga facility will be built just beyond this fence.
“HeBIOT is an acronym. It stands for high-efficiency biological treatment, and it’s a patented technology, patent by Entsorga,” Hogbin said, “It uses the biology of waste if you will, the decomposition of waste, to prepare the waste to be used for a fuel.”
Hogbin says while there are other resource recovery facilities in the United States, this facility is the only one that will use the HeBIOT technology. The waste is turned into a confetti-like material by use of high-tech machines operated by humans within a clean room. The material is then dried and can be burned for fuel and used as a replacement for some non-renewable resources like coal. And that’s what Hogbin says may keep the state from embracing the new fueling system.
“We were worried about there being some concern, particularly from downstate, about the impact on coal, because this would be competing with coal,” Hogbin noted.
With the push from the federal government to reduce carbon emission, however, Hogbin says recycling refuse is a viable option for not just West Virginia, but the entire country.
Credit Liz McCormick / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Clint Hogbin, chairman of the Berkeley County Solid Waste Authority, stands in the field soon to be under construction.
“Emissions from burning of this material has been studied. It’s been studied by Entsorga. It’s also been studied by the United States Environmental Protection Agency who literally sent this board a letter, advising us their opinion of burning this material was significantly lower or equal to the emissions of burning coal.”
Entsorga has an agreement with another Italian company called Essroc, also located in Berkeley County. The confetti-like material produced at the Entsorga plant, will be sent to Essroc, where this fuel will be used to power the plant that makes cement.
Apple Valley Waste Services will also play a role by providing Entsorga with the garbage it will use to make the fuel.
Hogbin says once the Entsorga facility is up-and-running, it would employ around 12 people, with salaries ranging from forty to sixty-thousand dollars a year.
