CarbonTech putting car shreds, municipal waste to new use

When a car reaches the end of its life, it gets chopped up in the equivalent of a Cuisinart for automobiles.

It's shredded at one of more than 200 U.S. facilities, with the fabric, dirt, glass, plastic, and insulation known as automobile shredder residue. It also includes iron, steel, aluminum, copper, brass, zinc, stainless steel and other valuable commodities.

Glendale, Ariz.-based CarbonTech is exclusive licensee of a process to process that shredder residue and municipal solid waste into three products: a clean coal equivalent, steam, and recovered metals trapped in the waste stream using an exothermic reactor, Daniel Shapiro of CarbonTech told the Cleantech Group.

The company thinks it’s in a unique position to reduce waste to landfills and generate a coal equivalent source of sustainable fuel, reducing dependence on fossil fuels.

Municipal solid waste is everything people throw away. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that waste has 6 percent to 8 percent metallic content. Shapiro also said that under normal economic circumstances, more than 5 million tons of auto shredder residue produced annually is 100 percent landfilled. CarbonTech has other plans for it. 

“We believe we can take materials already in landfills and process them,” he said.

The company’s principal founder is Michael Jaap, who has a background in the scrap metal industry. Hydrometallurgist Paul Kruesi, the inventor of the technology and president of Golden, Colo.-based CATO Research, first made the now-patented discovery of being able to recapture energy from organic waste. The patent covers the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, and Latin America, but not Asia.

Kruesi found that at a controlled temperature in a carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide chamber, hydrogen bonds are broken down and can produce CarbonTech’s three end products.

The company’s potential customers, and possible partners, include auto shredders, municipalities, existing landfills, and waste hauling companies. Utilities could also benefit because CarbonTech thinks its carbon has the capacity to fire boilers, which could drive steam turbines.

CarbonTech’s competition comes from gasification and plasma arc companies (see How to up your biodiesel production: torch it) as well as facilities that take municipal solid waste and burn it. Some mass burn facilities can be clean operating and relatively efficient for large metropolitan areas, Shapiro said.

But CarbonTech is positioning its technology as better suited for smaller communities. Shapiro said his company is a lower energy consumer compared to most of its competition because the reaction is exothermic, and requires little energy to sustain its process.

Another company pursuing auto shredder residue is San Francisco-based ECO₂ Plastics (see The dirty little secret of plastic recycling). Similarly, Houston, Texas-based Laurus Energy is taking its coal gasification technology underground (see Laurus Energy finds clean coal solution?).

CarbonTech says its technology and chemical, rather than combustion process, has been proven at the Colorado School of Mines and the Hazen Research in Golden, Colo. Shapiro thinks the technology can be scaled to process 25 tons an hour.

The company is considering a number of business models, including owning and operating the equipment and charging customers, or licensing the technology and receiving residual fees.

The company, founded in 2007, has been fine tuning its technology since 2002, funded by about $500,000 from an affiliated scrap metal company, Glendale-based Copper Consulting Industries. CarbonTech says it is now open to other funding options, such as grants, loans, an equity infusion or convertible debt.

CarbonTech is seeking $1.5 million from angels, investors, or potential partners to pilot its technology and generate data to allow engineers to scale up the process in a commercial demonstration. Shapiro said the cash-negative company could have a commercial facility up and running in less than 18 months. The funds would be used to sustain current activities on a general basis and to pilot test the technology.

“We’d love to find an angel that shares our vision,” Shapiro said.

CarbonTech is one of 30 potential new investment opportunities the Cleantech Group added to its innovation pipeline this week, available exclusively to members of the Cleantech Network. Members can click here to search the database.

Interested in emerging cleantech innovations? Here are two new U.S. companies added to the Cleantech Group's database this week also looking for funding:

• Concentrating photovoltaic solar energy system developer GreenField Solar, located near Cleveland, Ohio, is raising $2.5 million to continue its system development, including completing 15 units that have been sold. The company also develops thermal energy systems for utilities and other commercial customers. GreenField said its StarGen concentrator technology, which includes its proprietary PV cell, helps to lower installation costs.
• Highland, N.Y.-based Prism Solar Technologies is raising an undisclosed amount of capital. The company manufactures a new proprietary photovoltaic module that uses transparent holographic optical elements to collect, spectrally select, and focus light onto solar cells. Prism said its strategic advantage lies in its patented core holographic planar concentrator technology, which helps to reduce the cost of solar cells and lowers the module cost per watt.

Seeking capital, partners or customers? Submit to the Cleantech’s innovation pipeline.

Browse past pitches here.

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