The Hawaii County Planning Department has approved a waste-to-energy plant that aims to reduce the amount of waste headed to landfills and instead to divert it to create energy. The Hawaii Tribune-Herald is reporting that BioEnergy Hawaii will lease about 15 acres to build a modern facility.“The County of Hawaii Planning Department has reviewed the comments received during the 30-day comment period on the draft environmental assessment,” said Planning Director Michael Yee in a letter to the state, as reported by the paper. “We have determined that the project will not have significant environmental effects.”
BioEnergy Hawaii to build a waste separation and anaerobic digestion facility that will produce methane and other gases, with byproducts to include soil amendments and fertilizer, the paper says. A smaller, closed thermal gasification unit will generate electricity, it adds.
The methane will then power garbage trucks run by Pacific Waste, which currently hauls 80% of all commercial waste there. “We’re going to build a state of the art facility, and we know what we’re doing,” Guy Kaniho, BioEnergy Hawaii general manager, the paper reports. “We know when we pick up the trash, we’ll be able to process it.”
If all goes as planned, the facility will open in the summer of 2019. The 200-ton-per-day facility could divert as much as 70 percent of its municipal solid waste, the paper says. It could later be expanded to 400 tons per day.
