Moving Forward

St. Landry’s waste-to-energy program has been cited as a model for small communities by Energy Vision, a national environmental organization based in New York City.

The lead-in to a video interview by Energy Vision’s Joanna Underwood with Katry Martin, director of the St. Landry Parish Solid Waste District, urges: “U.S. communities! Think you’re too small to turn your organic wastes into vehicle fuel? Check out St Landry Parish, Louisiana, where they are doing it and making money!”

The district has been operating a program since 2012 to capture methane gas that leaks from landfills and put it to practical use. Since then, the district has used the gas to fuel its own vehicles and a substantial part of the sheriff’s department fleet. It recently expanded the program after Progressive Waste, the principal waste collector in the parish, agreed to purchase the gas to fuel part of its fleet.

Underwood said that Energy Vision has “been looking for almost a decade at new fuels that could be added to the mix of fuels for transportation that would be clean, that would be renewable, [and] that would be low in carbon if not carbon neutral.”

The St Landry Parish operation in Beggs, she said, creates such a fuel, “a renewable form of natural gas” that comes from the biogas that is naturally created when organic waste decomposes.

“We can collect it and refine it, and suddenly you have … a gas that is just like the natural gas that people use to heat their homes,” she said, “and you can use it to power millions of this country’s buses and trucks and cars and police vehicles.”

Steve Wittmann, a representative of BioCNG, the developer of the biogas conditioning system used by St. Landry Parish to make the gas useable, has called the program “a tremendous success story for the parish.” Underwood termed it “a very exciting project.”

Martin said the district’s commission began considering the idea as far back as 2008 and that since then the program has developed into “a mass fueling operation for a large number of both refuse and utility vehicles.”

The director also noted that the program includes an environmental education component for St. Landry students that puts a big emphasis on the concept of energy from waste.

Martin noted that energy from waste comes from “a multitude” of sources, but that smaller facilities such as the one in St. Landry face some challenges

“In a facility the size that we have, we don’t have the luxury of a large amount of energy,” he said. “We have a modest amount. What we found most practical was to make the best use of a small quantity of high quality landfill gases,” he said.

Martin said he and waste district leaders and workers were proud to be singled out by Underwood and others as “true national pioneers.” But he also said that “we feel it’s all in a day’s work.”

He said there would be a large environmental impact if everyone, “particularly [larger] municipalities …  put forth [the effort] to step into an arena that is new” and develop practical gas reclamation programs.