Randy 'The Recycler' Williams lets nothing go to waste

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

By Jake Nichols

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-A decade ago, this story would have appeared in Mother Earth News. Randy Williams would be called a tree hugger, a greenie, or worse. Ours has always been a nation of consumers. It mattered little that most of the world’s dinosaur juice was pumped mainly from countries that hate us. We wanted and wasted often. Talk of sustainability was for hippies; recycling, the rhetoric of wackos.

But today, a 55-gallon barrel of crude oil is approaching $100 a barrel. Recent news from the World Wildlife Fund reports that over 140 of the world’s leading scientists believe we are consuming the Earth’s resources at three times the rate at which they can be replenished. They say there will be nothing left by the year 2050.

Making something out of nothing is what Randy Williams set out to do five years ago. Now he watches it happen everyday at the Teton County transfer station.

“Bob Lucas brought me up here and showed me the waste going on,” Williams remembers. “There was a large pile of dimensional wood waste, about 4,500 tons of it a year. The county was paying to have it ground up. Then they were paying to have it hauled down to the Sublette County landfill, and then they paid a tipping fee on top of that.”

As a man who has spent some 30 years in natural resource management, Williams knew there was a better way. And as the executive director of the Teton Conservation District, he was in a position to do something about it.

Today, that pile of wood is ground up at the rate of 60 tons an hour. The end product is wood chips used for heating greenhouses in the northern U.S. and Canada. Some wood chips are being composted and trucked to Rexburg to Basic American Foods where they are used in a steam-powered plant to process potatoes.

“We are also working with the town to use some of the mulch along the sides of pathways, offsetting the need to have excessive amounts of pesticides for weed control,” Williams says.

Interesting uses for a pile of wood the town couldn’t pay anyone to take. But Williams is more ambitious. He wants the homerun.

“I look at it in a community sense,” Williams says. “Why outsource everything and bring everything into our community to sustain ourselves? That’s really not sustainability. If we’re really going to be sustainable then we are going to need products like this that we can turn back into energy or make into compost that can go back into the soils. To me, that’s being sustainable. That’s using stuff that’s right here with products that we need to get rid of anyway.”

Williams would like to see his wood chipper making compost for vegetables grown in a local greenhouse heated by wood pellets produced from a pile of castoff pallets, two-by-fours and plywood. Better yet, he could heat the high school, the hospital, even the Town of Jackson.

“We can take wood chips or pellets and can go into schools or other institutional type buildings like hospitals, and we can produce heat on an extremely competitive level – on an economic par with, say, natural gas or electric prices,” Williams claims.
“In Darby, Mont., they are heating three schools, and the emissions from that whole system are equivalent to about two or three modern day pellet stoves. It’s a very, very clean energy from an emissions standpoint, and they are saving well over $100,000 a year on their utility bills.”

Wyoming is the latest state to join five others in a program called “Fuels for Schools,” which promotes the use of wood biomass as a renewable, natural resource. Currently, over 40 school systems get their heat from scrap wood, each saving $50,000 to $150,000 a year. In less than three days, Williams’s wood chipper can grind enough wood to heat the Jackson Hole High School for a year.

Water quality was another issue the Teton Conservation District wanted to address when it was issued a special use permit by the Forest Service to truck out horse manure generated by the dude string at Jenny Lake Lodge. With the help of Terra Firma Organics and its portable wood grinder, Williams not only solved the problem but helped the Wyoming Department of Transportation.

“We had high nutrient loads in some nearby streams here in the county from horse manure,” says Williams. “We thought, ‘Well, that material is high in nitrogen and the wood is high in carbon. You put the two together and, voila, you’ve got compost, which is carbon-neutral and highly usable in this county.’”

Williams will ship a million pounds of compost from Buffalo Valley to Togwotee Pass to be used in the WYDOT highway redevelopment.

“Another good example of how we could put compost to use was the Canyon Club,” Williams says. “At the time that was being built, they brought in over 300 truckloads of compost for that golf course and, you know, we could have produced that right here and at the same time solved some environmental issues we were having.”

Compost is one thing, but wood as an alternative energy source is what has Williams and others with vision really excited.

“St. Paul, Minn., uses wood chips to heat 31 million square feet,” he says. “They literally heat most of the downtown infrastructure. It works very, very efficiently. We could easily heat all of downtown Jackson with this wood, which would be pretty neat. We could have heated sidewalks and the town could be heated and the energy would be coming from right here.”

The Teton Conservation District along with Terra Firma Organics is one of the first recipients of grant money from the 1 Percent for the Tetons fund, which now boasts over 50 business participators and doled out $100,000 in grant money in its inaugural year. This December, the district will launch a food waste program with its 1 Percent grant money in a cooperative effort with Jackson Whole Grocer, Four Seasons Resort, The Blue Lion, the Journeys School, and others.

“We estimate there is approximately 4,000 tons a year that we could take out of food waste, and instead of that going to the landfill it can be composted,” Williams says.
Gypsum from discarded sheetrock is also being used in soil remediation at drilling sites in the natural gas fields. Terra Firma is working with a nominee for the Nobel Prize on an enzyme that converts wood cellulose to ethanol more efficiently. An ethanol plant being built in Upton, Wyo., is expected to be one of the largest in the U.S. upon completion.

“A company out of Rexburg, Idaho, produces a solar type of energy that is not photovoltaic but is on the concept of, like, a magnifying glass,” Williams says. “It concentrates sunlight on a metal plate which is then used to heat hot water in your house.”

A change is happening. The mindset of Americans is shifting. Still, even with public sentiment in tow, Williams knows it’s the bottom line that sways policymakers.
“You do have to show a spreadsheet. You have to show a bottom line and it has to work,” he admits. “We have looked at other sources of energy; corn, for instance. It is a big thing in the U.S. with the talk of going to ethanol. Well, that’s only about a 10 percent net energy gain after the whole process. You take wood, that’s a 300 to 500 percent positive gain. In the next couple of years we are looking at somewhere in the realm of $300,000 to $400,000 a year in savings to the county. I think numbers like that would get a legislator’s attention.”

The technology is there, Williams says, even if we do lag behind Europe.
“They have the technology, the science, the delivery systems, the education with the public,” he says. “They are just way ahead of us in that regard. Most of the wood pellets generated in Canada and the U.S. are being shipped overseas. Does that make sense? When we should be using that technology right here?

But the tide is turning. This article appears not in Mother Earth News but in the Planet. In another 10 years, Williams might be reading these radical new energy source ideas in the New York Times business section.

“It’s happening,” he says of the trend to make communities more sustainable. “Everywhere I go I see it picking up. I’ve been to 25 different states now looking at these programs. Everywhere I go, everyone is on a real steep curve and ramping up with the technology and bringing systems on board.”
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Randy 'The Recycler' Williams lets nothing go to waste | Planet JH News Article: General Environment

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