David decided to make a move and told me that he wanted to incorporate the business but that he would get 51% of the stock and he would be the President and Chairman of the Board. I wasn’t sure what a President or Board Chairman did, or what was the difference, but I certainly wasn’t buying what sounded like a subordinate position. I told David he needed to wait for a cold day in hell and we went our separate ways. I learned later that he had still gotten the sweet taste of getting unwanted goods for free from businesses but wasn’t going to be fooling with dangerous chemicals. Meanwhile, I was completely focused on chemicals and discovered Silicon Valley, the home of chemical usage. I moved to Fifth Street in Berkeley when Richard Nixon in 1972 suddenly dumped an unexpected bonanza in my lap. Nixon put price controls on commodities and created a raging black market in chemicals and similar goods, including cement and gasoline. Suddenly construction sites could not get the cement they needed because it was all on the high seas, in multi-hundred ton ships coming from Romania or Argentina, off the market until they could tap into the black market prices for their freight. Locally, people were lining up at gas stations to slowly fill up tanks with the gas that came dribbling in. If your license plate ended with an even number, you could get gas on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If an odd number, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Because I had been cold calling businesses for a year to ask them if they had spare chemicals, I just continued to do that, but now they were cagy. The rationing included allotments. If you had been using a truckload of nitric acid every week before the rationing started, you could still get that truckload during rationing at standard pricing. But what if you didn’t need all of that nitric acid anymore? You could still get your allotment but you could sell the odd surplus truckload to a black market broker. Or you might decide that it made more sense to stop making that coating which used the acid and sell the acid for three times what you paid for it instead. New uses for chemicals couldn’t be slipped into the allotments so companies needed to buy on the black market to keep going. Since I knew all the chemical companies, and the users, I found myself in a perfect position.

The business itself was intense. I was juggling rumors about truckloads of trichloroethylene and shiploads of cement on the high seas, all for different and changing prices, with the need to arrange payments of many thousands of dollars from strangers. Stories flew back and forth about sources and sellers looking for high buyers. I would talk all day to buyers and to other brokers all around the country. The telephone was never out of my ear. At ten to five, the pressure to complete a sale today rose to a fever pitch and then, the clock struck five and no one answered their phone anywhere on the West Coast. Bang! It all stopped. No more business could be done. The rush of relaxation as the pressure suddenly stopped was too much. Every day at ten after five, I got a raging headache from the change. At six the next morning it would all start up again as the Eastern time zones started in to do business.

I had a special insight because I was a chemist who had become familiar with all the chemical users on the West Coast. This kind of knowledge was considered pure gold by the brokers, who didn’t even know how to pronounce the names of chemicals. I did quite well, as I will get to in a few pages.

DROOL

The pressure of scarcity led to some funny new businesses. One I recall had to do with plastic “drool”. I had never heard of it before but I learned in a hurry. Here was a possible source of virgin plastic that had been thrown away until Nixon changed everything. It came from the plastic blowers – people who made plastic bags or sheeting. The way that machinery works is this. The plastic pellets that constituted the input were melted and extruded through a round nozzle. In the middle of the nozzle was a second nozzle for air. As the molten plastic began to exit, air would be blown into the middle of it, causing the hot plastic to expand into an air filled cylinder as it fell. The plastic would be cooled and then could be, for example, chopped into fixed lengths and each section would have one end sealed, after which it had become one of the well-known plastic bags. But what happened to get this process started. Some molten plastic had to start coming out until the flow stabilized, then the air could start. Meanwhile the plastic extrusion was run into a box or collector where it took on otherworldly shapes while it cooled. This was the drool. In a world where plastics people could not get the virgin plastic they needed, drool was suddenly a commodity. Brokers all over competed to buy it from the blowers. And strangely, there was suddenly a lot of it. I wonder why?

ISOPROPYL ALCOHOL

Microcomputer shops in Silicon Valley had never thought much about the chemicals they used because they were always just available but suddenly their fabrication lines were stopping because they could not get the solvents, etchants and cleaners they needed. Part of the reason was that the chemical manufacturers themselves were not slow to figure out that diverting output from the standard allocations into higher priced channels made more sense for them than just satisfying Nixon’s allocations. Suddenly they didn’t have enough output to entirely satisfy their former customers who were then left high and dry. Enter the brokers, such as myself.

One of the solvents that was needed for final cleaning was isopropyl alcohol, a simple alcohol that is traditionally mixed with 30% of water and sold as rubbing alcohol. But 100% alcohol was not so easy to keep coming. The allocated price was about $1.25 per gallon. In a year, this price rose to about $1.50 a gallon. Silicon Valley limped along but always looked for additional sources. Silicon Valley was a dream customer because the alcohol did not form a part of their incredibly valuable product but was critically needed to create that value. As a result, they cared not at all what they had to pay for their isopropyl alcohol, so long as they could keep it coming. The brokered price rose to $4.50 a gallon.

My specialty was in knowing how chemical usage was shared by companies in completely different industries. I knew very well that huge users of isopropyl alcohol (IPA) were those who made cleaning compounds for residential and small business applications. Your dishwashing liquid might be based on IPA. Large amounts were sold to local airports for de-icing fluids to be sprayed on the wings of airplanes in cold weather. I knew all of the compounders and kept in touch with them. One day, a compounder in Oakland told me that he had received an allocation of fifty drums of IPA and could I sell them for him. The price he wanted was $1.50 per gallon. Of course I could sell them. I could sell a truckload a week if I could find it and I could make $3.00 profit on every gallon. Total profit on 50 fifty-five gallon drums would be $15,750 dollars before shipping expenses. We made the arrangements to have a truck pick up the drums.

On the day before pickup, Floyd told me that he had discovered that he had undervalued the IPA and he would need more money. With my heart in my throat, holding my breath, I asked what he would be wanting for the IPA. An extra ten cents a gallon was his answer. $1.60 per gallon. After hesitating for a beat, I told him I thought I could handle that and we agreed to continue. Then I hung up and collapsed into a puddle on the floor.

REFLOW OIL

There were lots of businesses around Silicon Valley that you might think of as flaky or less than ethical if you didn’t know how the chemical business works. Like many other businesses - pharmaceuticals come to mind today - the key is knowing what to do and how to make the product. It might be piss easy to make some product that will clean your microchips or suppress your cancer but if you are the only one with the knowledge, you get to set the price arbitrarily. At that time, components like capacitors and resistors were soldered into copper coated printed circuit boards. The solder could be electroplated onto the board and onto the wires sticking out in just the right places but the solder did not make a fully satisfactory contact unless it was then melted in place. To do this, a heavy, high boiling fluid was used that could be heated so hot that it would melt the solder as the bottom of the boards were gingerly exposed to it. This was known as “reflow oil”. Most of it wasn’t an oil at oil, but a water soluble surfactant made by Rohm and Haas Company and sold as Triton X-101. The fab shops who used it didn’t know what it really was or where it came from. So the Jasco company would buy it by the truckload. In their yard, they soaked the Triton X-101 labels off the drums and slapped their own impressive “Jasco Reflow Oil” labels on the drums. Then they turned around and sold the Reflow Oil to the circuit shops for three or four times the price of Triton X-101. I watched them do it.

As the reflow oil was used, it slowly decomposed from the heat and became dark. Because it was water soluble, the brilliant circuit shops would pour the used reflow oil down the drains. Because it was actually a surfactant, a detergent, it would cause luxuriant but intolerable suds and foaming down at the water treatment plant. The city was always searching for the miscreants who were putting reflow oil down the drain.

A few years later, I made contact with a broker in Chicago who needed surfactant to add to what was called “downhole fluids”. This was a special mixture of fluids with special functions that could be pumped into oil wells to prime and lubricate them to keep the oil coming out, something like the fracking fluids used today. I collected all of the reflow oil available anywhere in Silicon Valley, had a local chemical company run it through a filter to remove solids, and shipped it to the midwest. We got paid on both ends, though we never made as much as Jasco that switched labels.

GOLD

Gold was another curious chemical that circulated in the Valley. The fab shops plated gold over all the contacts on the circuit boards to prevent oxidation. First there was a layer of copper on the epoxy circuit boards, then gold went over the copper at the contacts on the edges of the boards. Many boards were rejected as part of the quality testing and had to be reused or destroyed. Of course the fab shops wanted to get back the gold on the contacts. They would cut off all the contacts and when they filled up a couple of large drums, they would send it out for gold recovery.

I hired Adam as an assistant. He told me of working for Belmont Plating that did gold sputtering. They had a pure gold source in a vacuum inside a glass bell jar. When the gold got hot enough, it would boil off inside the jar and land on the target which was something that needed to be covered with gold. Meanwhile the gold went all over and also covered the inside of the bell jar. As the gold layer on the glass got thicker, the transparency of the glass decreased. When the gold layer was too thick, Adam’s job was to open up the bell jar and strip the gold layer off the glass, then throw in in the wastebasket. When he realized what was happening, he asked if he could just keep the gold. “Sure, take it if you want” he was told. Adam doubled his salary this way.

The first and ongoing method for capturing the gold value was to burn the contacts at such a high temperature that the epoxy burned off, releasing quite a bit of nasty smoke. Then the gold and copper were smelted into pebbles or ingots. This was classical gold smelting procedure, such as had been common in the gold fields of California. Of course it was really a dumb method, like most of recycling.

The three companies in the gold recapture business would weigh the output, report to the fab shops what their yield of gold was, and then pay for the product. Of course the pressure to cheat the shops by underreporting the yield was intense. To try to wriggle out from under the thumb of the smelters, who alone knew the yield, the fab shops would chop the tabs fine, divide the booty into three parts and give a third to each of the smelters, in hopes of comparing the reported yields afterwards. The theory was that the company reporting the highest yield would be thought of as the most honest, and preferentially used for subsequent batches. Classic competition! With as much success as most competition.

Of course the smelters had a common formula. They would all typically report about one-third of the actual yield, with occasional, sporadic digressions to impress the fab shops with the greater honesty of now this smelter, then later, that smelter. It was all a game that the purchasing agents (for smelting services) knew all too well. As always, there was so much money in microchips that losses in gold value were not a cause for alarm.

A few years later, it occurred to me that the whole process could be remarkably simplified. Zero Waste Systems appointed itself a gold recovery agent without any smelter. Since the gold was always plated onto copper, I realized that all that was needed was to soak the product in nitric acid and dissolve off the copper. Then the gold flakes would float free and could be easily filtered out. This worked perfectly and so we began to process more and more gold.

One day I realized that we had an unprotected, uninsured laboratory with pounds of gold running through it, in a not very nice neighborhood. The coming result was inescapable and predictable. We would be ripped off of our gold. One day, coming into work, the lock would be broken, the doors forced and the gold missing. Rather than try to create a fortress, we just bowed out of the gold business. We had made our point, and it was time to cut our future losses. We stopped processing gold.

ZEROL LACQUER THINNER

We discovered our biggest business when I decided one day to take a trip down to Silicon Valley to scope out the rest of the immensely valuable chemicals that those dopes were hiring people to take away and then the hauler dopes would actually destroy it. Okay, I knew that some of these dopes had engineering degrees and knew how to make microchips out of sand. But they were still dopes.

I visited a number of shops that told me the same story. They would cover the purified silicon with a photoresist, expose it to light, wash off the unexposed resist with butyl acetate, then etch the silicon with hydrofluoric acid and finally wash off the remaining resist with xylene. Then they would plumb the excess xylene and the excess butyl acetate into a single tank for discard (yes, that’s the main part that made them dopes). There wasn’t any reason in the world for mixing the two solvents together and yet every single fab shop did it the same way. Just because they each had some photoresist in them? Give me a break! The more you mix the less value remains. And yet, somehow, without their being able to even guess it, the engineers had inadvertently mixed together two solvents which were both expensive and both good solvents for a lacquer thinner. As soon as I discovered this, I told them to hold the presses. I got a sample and brought it over to Vic Emerich at Triangle Paint in Berkeley. He loved the idea of getting a couple of valuable solvents that he could use in making lacquer thinner. So I sent a gleaming stainless steel chemical tank truck over to Nitron Corporation as soon as they told me they had filled up their 5000 gallon tank with the mixture, which was everywhere called “developer-rinse”. When the tank truck parked in front of my house on Fifth St. in Berkeley and the driver knocked on my door, I told him to take it around the corner to Triangle Paint. At $2.50 a gallon for a solvent I had gotten for free, I made a very nice sale. After that, for the next ten years, we took every drop of developer-rinse that Silicon Valley could provide. We got it mostly in 55 gallon drums and then we repacked it into pints, quarts, gallons and sometimes even sold it in drums. No treatment or purification was required, a fact that sometimes astounds those who hear about this project. We would put a label on each container saying Zerol and sold it as a lacquer thinner everywhere. Sometimes we even sold it to the paint shops that were painting the chassis’ for the microchips to be installed in. It was an amazing success and accounted for a constant income. Antique strippers loved it for removing old finishes from antiques. At the cheap price we could sell it for, they could fill up a tank and dip old chairs and doors into the tank. The smell was a bit strong, unlike standard lacquer thinners which were cut with plenty of petroleum spirits (paint thinner) that didn’t dissolve anything but also didn’t have much of a smell. But our price was irresistible (pun intended - “resist”) since we were paid to take it away.

STAINLESS MESH AND MYLAR

Some more physical items that we also took from the printed circuit shops were stainless mesh, scraps of printed circuit board and lightweight, silvered mylar. I remember fondly the curvaceous artist lady who bought a roll of the mylar and confided to me that she was going to run naked on the beach with the mylar trailing and flapping out behind her. Unfortunately for my overeager lascivity, I never managed to get down to the beach for the “performance art”. The stainless steel mesh was extremely fine. It was used by the shops for making silkscreens that would never wear out for applying resist to the microchips. We got in rolls and all manner of scraps. One good use that we came up with was to make coffee filters out of it. Just cut a piece into a circle, cut out a radial sector and then sew the remaining edges together to make a conical funnel. Today coffee filters made from stainless mesh can be bought in any coffee store but back then, they didn’t exist. We invented them.

CIRCUIT BOARD SCRAPS - COPPERTILE

The printed circuit scraps came in some pretty huge pieces. They were made of strong and rigid, reinforced epoxy plastic inside, but covered on both sides with a plating of copper. They looked like sheets of copper but of course we could sell them much more cheaply than copper metal. We got them for free. We had a pile ten feet high sitting outside of our fence. The question was: what could we make out of them? Eventually we came up with the idea of selling them for roofing tiles, to replace real copper. We called them “Coppertile” and searched for an application. Finally, a famous golfer, who was planning to install a copper roof on his new house in Napa heard of Coppertile and expressed interest. This would have been a famous application if we could get through the Napa building inspectors. As it turned out, they were amazingly approachable. They invited us up to Napa to test out the fire resistance of Coppertile. When we got there, they build a small fire on the ground and asked us to hold the two ends of a long piece of Coppertile over the fire. There was smoke, the plastic got soft, but the tile could not be pulled apart. The inspectors told us the Coppertile passed and Johnny the Golfer could use Coppertile for his roof. Then disaster struck. Johnny won his golf championship and won so much money that he decided that real, metal copper shingles would be a superior roof. Goodbye to Coppertile in Architectural Designs magazine.

Today, if you visit Ashkenaz Music and Dance center in Berkeley California, you will find the bathrooms all covered in Coppertile. This is the only application I know of that still remains from the legend of Coppertile.

FREON

There were lots of successes of many kinds. One day, Dr. White from UC Berkeley called up to ask if we had any ideas for how he could reuse a thousand gallons of freon that he had been using for an experiment. He had made a big refrigerated apparatus but the experiment was over and he no longer wanted the freon. He had called up DuPont, from whom he had bought the freon at great expense, and they told him to just vent it into the air. This was at a later time than the Montreal Protocol, forbidding the release of ozone destroying fluorocarbons into the atmosphere, but what did they care about a mere international treaty? Fortunately, Dr. White told them to go take a train to nowhere and called Zero Waste Systems for help. Ultimately he covered a coil of copper tubing with acetone and dry ice (a common freezing combination in laboratories) and ran the freon through it to condense it to a liquid. We brought over a half dozen special, heavy duty freon drums which were widely available to us in Silicon Valley and we ran the liquified freon into the drums. A week later, we sold the freon to a refrigerator supply place.

GASOLINE AND AMMONIA

Another time, Good Chevrolet, a car sales place in Alameda, had inadvertently poured five gallons of concentrated ammonia into its 500 gallon tank of gasoline. They didn’t know what to do. The great world of conventional insanity had only DISCARD AND CHEMICAL DISPOSAL to offer as usual. I didn’t have to even hesitate. After quoting a hefty treatment fee to the car company, we filled up ten drums with the mixture, added more water, ascertained where the aqueous ammonia layer was sitting in the bottom and then pumped out the upper layer of perfectly pure and usable gasoline into new drums which we used for our truck for the next few months. Ammonia is so soluble in water that there was none of it in the gasoline. And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway since it just adds a mildly alkaline reaction to the gasoline, which does no harm. We gave the ammonia away to a cleaning company, after separating the last bits of gasoline from it in a large glass flask.

Another time, a freight company had had a spill in one of its trucks. The spilled chemical, benzal chloride is a lachrymator, like concentrated onion juice but ten times worse. The truck could not be used. I did a little research and discovered that sodium hydroxide will catalyze the conversion of benzal chloride in air to benzyl chloride, a sweet smelling solvent. Donning some spray protection, I went in the truck and sprayed it all over with a dilute sodium hydroxide solution. After shutting up the truck overnight, in the morning it smelled lovely. A final spray wash with water was all it required.

Another time, a company called us to check out three drums of some solvent that had lost its labels. I gingerly took a sniff, as chemists do, and thought it smelled like pyridine, a chemical I had heretofore known only in small bottles. I took a sample, checked that it was pyridine and took the drums for reuse.

Not only was it pyridine, but it was three degree pyridine, one of the purest kinds. It was easy to put a label on the drums and sell it to a user.

LAB CHEMICALS

One of our biggest successes came in the form of reselling laboratory bottles of chemicals. This came about when I learned that it was standard practice for chemical dumps to bring in truckloads of drums what were packed full of individual bottles of chemicals, all packed together in expanded mica, also known as vermiculite, a lightweight insulating material commonly used for making low density potting soils. What was wrong with the bottles? Why were they being discarded this way? What great toxic threat did they represent? The short answer is – none! No one wanted them anymore so in a grand paroxysm of thoughtlessness, “environmentally conscious” academics would gleefully pack them up and “throw them away”. Or stockroom assistants in industry would do as they were told with laboratory bottles that were no longer needed for an experiment. In academia, when a professor would move or expire, he would leave his laboratory behind and an accommodating “hazardous chemical disposal” company would be called in to bring over the drums. One or two students might salvage their favorite chemical but the rest were destined for the dance of the dump. Often the lab chemicals were brand new and perfectly usable and quite valuable but none of this would be noted. So Zero Waste Systems put in a large area of shelving, embraced and were given these bottles and cans of valuable chemicals and began to resell them to an eager public. It could not have been easier or more obvious.

After getting this laboratory chemical project started, the two National Labs in our area, the Berkeley Radiation Lab (the “radlab”) and the Lawrence Livermore National Fusion Laboratory would call us regularly for their excesses. Livermore especially had many exotic and valuable elements that we could stock our shelves with, creating unique stockpiles of available chemicals. We would often get entire cases of brand new chemicals of which one bottle was sampled and the whole case rejected. When Dow Chemical closed its research laboratory stockroom in Pittsburg California, we bought two truckloads of valuable chemicals for twenty-five dollars. Sometimes the sources of the chemicals would come in to buy back something they had given us and suddenly needed again. Amateur inventors and researchers took advantage of our enormous and unique stockroom.

Because we got in chemicals from everywhere, that were not being tracked in the normal way, we of course had chemicals that were of interest to those running clandestine drug labs. Occasionally we got in bottles of phenylacetone (“P2P”), an important precursor for methamphetamine. We received unreal offers for this chemical among others. It did not take long for the local Drug Enforcement officials to take an interest in our wares. They made us an amazing offer. They wanted us to sell these restricted chemicals under conditions that would allow them to track who bought them and where they went. In order to make this work, they would instruct the chemical manufacturers to sell us the P2P for normal rates, of about $15 per bottle, and they wanted us to resell it for whatever we could get, which turned out to be about $750 per bottle. In their eyes, the more we got, the less money the clandestine labs made, which they liked. Any sales had to be made by appointment only. The cops would park outside, watch for the buyers to show up and then follow them afterwards. The buyers knew what was going on also. On more than one occasion, I was told to give an address to the cops so they would know where the chemicals were going. The DEA agents would track cars in and out of tunnels and down dirt roads to hidden labs using helicopter backup. Afterwards, I got to hear the stories of how the chase had gone. All the players got some of what they wanted so the arrangement continued for a year or two. Ultimately, this caused the destruction of Zero Waste Systems, due, of course, to greed for money. But that is a separate story.

OFFICIAL SUPPORT

Throughout its history Zero Waste Systems got some token promotional support from the local government but never received a grant or a loan or anything smelling of real financial help.

Early in our career, the federal Environmental Protection Agency learned of our work, which was unique in the United States. There were plenty of business based “waste exchanges” which the EPA and various Chambers of Commerce set up but they never accomplished anything worth a damn. They didn’t understand the problem. They thought that “waste” was something they needed to “get rid of” in the common, absurd terminology. So they conceptualized the problems they faced as finding a better way to “get rid of” a “waste product”. Every garbage company in the country today and every political institution today is still using this unproductive, meaningless formulation. The real problem, of course, is how do you design a product and a process that produces no waste at all in the first place? That is the one goal worth pursuing. Once you have produced something that no one wants, it will be degraded in a thousand ways and conformed to the essential meaning of “waste” as “something unusable”

The word “waste” is that rara avis, a one word, internally inconsistent oxymoron. It sounds like a noun, like something you have, but in fact it embodies the meaning of “unusable something”. If something undeniably exists, but has no use, then no one wants it, no one takes care of it and it really is not a thing or a commodity at all. Thus the oxymoron.

When ZWS took a product from a company that just wanted to be rid of it, we would not touch products that had had a chance to be degraded. If they wanted to dump floor sweepings into a solvent drum, they could solve their own problem. When we took something, it had to be properly collected in as pure a form as possible, so that we had a useful and valuable product to sell. We were not interested in “getting rid of” anyone’s garbage for them

.

This was the opposite of the view of the Waste Exchanges fostered by the EPA. They tried to solve a waste problem by bureaucratic means – just a list of unwanted chemicals, a typewriter and a distribution mailing. Since no one wants someone else’s useless, degraded garbage, they had no successes to speak of, though the EPA spent many millions of dollars supporting these boondoggles. For ZWS, which was quite successful, they offered no support at all. Their idea of support was to grant contracts to the Arthur D. Little company to study us.

In the early seventies, the EPA learned of our existence. They offered to fly two of us to Washington DC for a chat about our business. We naively imagined they wanted to help us grow. Taking my two employees, one of whom was a nun in full regalia who had a degree in physics and a resume that included being the radiation safety officer for UC Berkeley, we flew to DC. We met with Jack Lehman (later Secretary of the Navy), the head of the EPA’s Solid Waste section. In the misdirected official vernacular of the time, solid waste included garbage, liquids and even gases. He proposed to us that we would take some time to write down all of the business decisions we had made and all of our business procedures.

“Why would we do that?” was the obvious question.

“ We will publish that and encourage other people to set up businesses like yours.”

“ So you propose to encourage our competition? Why would we do that?”

“ For the environmental benefit.”

“ Are we likely to obtain any financial or other support for ourselves?”

“ No.”

So we packed up our tent and went home, again, a bit wiser about the EPA.

At one point, the Jerry Brown administration in California got the Legislature to set up the California Pollution Control Financing Authority to whom they gave two hundred million dollars to give to

businesses who were reducing pollution. Jim McCall was the Executive Director.

NANCY, IZZY AND THE GANG, IN OFFICIAL SLIDES

(me in the blue suit, my wife Linda on the left side)

I met with Jim occasionally. He knew what we were doing and was quite supportive, personally. He wished he could help us out but he just could not find a way. Of course we were reducing pollution by finding new homes for unwanted chemicals which never became discarded garbage, but that wasn’t his mandate from the state of California. In their wisdom, the politicians needed to see pollution first. Then they would help big polluters to clean it up afterwards. Dow Chemical was discharging hydrochloric acid and titanium dioxide into the SF Bay, so they could get support from the fund, but avoiding pollution in the first place didn’t cut any ice with the politicians. End-of-pipe thinking ruled the roost then and continues today. Avoiding post facto cleanup detracts from the Gross Domestic Product and is therefore denigrated. Post facto cleanup adds to the GDP and is therefore good.

The only support we ever got was from the California Health Dept, Berkeley office. They put together some promotional materials for us, including a slide show.

In 1976, a young aspiring journalist named Linda Siskind came to interview me. She thought a hippy chemist who thought he could reuse chemicals was worth a story. She wrote an article called Recycling with a Valence which she submitted to the San Francisco Examiner magazine and amazingly, it was accepted. I was impressed with her “qualifications” and began to go out with her. A short while later we were married in the Berkeley Hills and soon after she became pregnant with the first of our three sons, Jake, who started life in a baby carrier propped up against the wall of the ZWS office. Linda became a capable bookkeeper who has stuck with me through thick and thin, despite a divorce 17 years later. She is pictured in the slide show, pregnant with Jake. The magazine article is appended at the end of this story.

RECYCLERS

At the same time, in California, a movement for recycling was growing. People were looking around for discarded products that they could find a way to recycle. Usually, the products they worked with were actually discarded, such as being found on curbs or in dumpsites, and usually the recyclers had little interest in the goods qua products but only as sources of component materials. About this time, the obsession with collecting steel, glass, aluminum, copper and paper started. No one else in the world specialized in chemicals as ZWS did. The recyclers didn’t understand what we were doing and had none of the theoretical concepts that I have presented but they grudgingly admired our work. They tended to lump it in with the rest of the recycling world.

Recyclers have never wanted to deeply understand the products they work with. Their ideas are to smash, destroy, cut up into parts and salvage a few low value materials. This is how they work with paper, glass, steel, plastics, copper etc. As soon as something becomes technical, they avoid actual knowledge and resort to either “Dispose Of Properly” or turn it over to some others with slightly more capability. Thus electronic components are smashed and sent to foreign countries where they are burned in villages for their materials. If some sophisticated refurbishers insist on repairing computers to make new computers for schools and young programmers, they are allowed to operate but just barely. The recyclers conspire with politicians to control the fate of all such commodities for the sake of the environmental posturing that it affords. If there is a flood of unwanted pharmaceuticals, recyclers just want to provide avenues for swift destruction and placement in a location that is out of sight. The idea of reusing these immensely valuable drugs gets no respect at all. To recyclers, these are simply scary and dangerous. Value is not a concept they understand. The idea of chemists being in charge of chemical reuse is a concept that recyclers have never accepted. Ignorance asserts dominion and Fear rules the roost.

At first the garbage companies were hostile to recycling, which was reasonable since the recyclers put forward a fantastical scenario of eliminating all goods going to the dump. Then the garbage companies realized that recycling was no threat to their business at all. They set up processing stations that they denoted as MRF’s for Materials Recovery Facilities. The MRF’s had a front end on which they smashed garbage to smithereens, then ran it on a conveyor belt to pick off the odd shard of glass or other bare material. Meanwhile the back end of the conveyor ran right into a dump. The recyclers ran interference with the politicians in order to garner the paltry returns from selling bales of paper or dumpsters full of broken glass while the dumpers rang up the big bucks. The halcyon days of garbage disposal have never left us and today the recyclers are still selling their false message to anyone gullible enough to listen.

The EPA mendaciously promotes the mantra “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”. The public accepts this as making sense to them, in a personal way, but to business it is of zero interest. Reduce their business indeed! Not since the Civil War has any business tried to reduce its usage of anything. Growth! That is what business is all about. Use more, use it faster. Reuse? Reuse what? The rule that works is to make products that fall apart as quickly as reasonable, so that the customer will buy more. The exhortation to reuse falls on deaf ears. But Recycle? That makes sense. Tell everyone that they can produce all the garbage they want because it will be recycled anyway; now that makes sense. So the real mantra is Recycle, Recycle and Recycle. That’s why recycling is so huge and reuse virtually unknown. The torrents of garbage gurgle and froth on their way to the dump and business is content. And the EPA knows perfectly well that this is the situation. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to make sure nothing interferes with recycling and dumping.

When Zero Waste Systems was no more, the recyclers never bemoaned its loss. They never sought to set up a similar organization or to understand why it vanished. They viewed ZWS as an aberration in the world of recycling, not as a lesson for how to deal with complex, threatening but valuable commodities. They have sought to ignore and denigrate the lessons that ZWS taught and to apply, instead, the brute force methods of destruction. Meanwhile, the major question for today is what is happening to the chemicals for which ZWS once provided reuse pathways. Take laboratory chemicals for example.

Lab chems are created and distributed in gigantic quantities as commercial, research and university laboratories all around the world buy reagents. A few pathetic distributions of unwanted chemicals have been set up by well-intentioned academics who routinely shoot themselves in the foot due to a lack of business sense. No one is in charge so the collection and listing of chemicals is partial at best. The dump is always beckoning so they put unrealistic short time frames on availability. They may want payment which slows everything down. They refuse to provide the lab chems to anyone outside of their own institutions which limits the potential market for no reason. Aside from these occasional efforts, lab chems are now either poured down a sink, as though this caused them to somehow vanish, or, more likely, packed in vermiculite in steel drums and buried deep in chemical dumps. The responsibility for intelligent treatment is thus buried out of sight and passed onto future generations to discover these sacrifice zones in the earth’s surface. They may curse our irresponsible generation but it will be too late for us.

DAVID MARCUS

Meanwhile, I kept hearing stories about David Marcus. Remember David, whom this story is about?

The first surprise phone call came from a group of doctors who had invested some of their “guilt money” (my interpretation since I don’t believe that doctors have any right to be so well compensated) in a cockamamie scheme incubated in the fertile imagination of David Marcus. I was told that Marcus had sold them on the idea that dumpsters in Berkeley were actually filled with high value discards that needed to be set free by low paid Mexicans pawing through dumpster contents for salable commodities. They had put in about $50,000 to divert two or three dumpsters onto an empty lot in Berkeley, have them tipped over and then search through them for value. The reader can see the direct evolution from our chemical recapturing startup to this less dangerous incarnation of finding gold in garbage. Of course, after the first dumpsters were obtained and dumped, Marcus had disappeared with the money, leaving the doctors holding the black bag, so to speak. Actually, holding the responsibility of cleaning up the vacant lot. The doctor I spoke with, told me that Marcus had told them, as part of his resume, that he had started my company. I admitted that in a sense, my company did in fact owe its genesis to David Marcus but that was as much help as I could offer. I didn’t know where to find David or their money.

About a year later, I got another call from a businessman in Modesto. From him, I learned that newspaper printers everywhere have a particular waste product which comes from printing with black ink on a cheap paper that tends to be covered in short fibers. As the printing proceeds, black ink and fibers mix together to create a fibrous mat, suffused with black ink. This ink has the insidious property that anyone within twenty feet of any of it, immediately becomes full of black stains on his face, his hands and his clothing. Printers have piles of it with no good idea of what to do with it. But David Marcus had convinced this group of businessmen that he had the solution. Vermiculture! Just put it in a big pile in a vacant lot (the leit motif of David’s scams) and turn loose a culture of big, hungry red worms to chew through it and turn it into valuable worm castings, which would fertilize orchards like nobody’s business. Of course while the worms were chewing away, David had chewed through their investments and now he was strangely missing. And oh yes, by the way, had he actually started my business?

The third time was a call from the magician himself. David informed me that he had changed his name and that from now on, I would be hearing about David Eagle, not Marcus. The reason had to do with his enormous admiration for these big birds but nothing to do with any evasion from people who might be on his trail. And by the way, if anyone asked, could I please tell them that he had started my business. If I said anything negative, he would sue me. We had a laugh over that. The idea of David with legal papers in a courtroom was worth a rollicking guffaw. I told him that I gave him a goodly measure of credit to anyone who asked. That was the last time we ever spoke. The next I heard was from some officials in Marin county. It seems that a David Eagle had been passing himself off as a guru, a psychoanalyst who occupied an office in Mill Valley where he had been advising clients, including for some financial investments, and now he was missing. Their research had suggested that maybe he had started my business. Could this be the case?

What I clearly need to do is to close the circle. I should place an ad in the Chronicle, looking for a dyslexic advisor for a chemical business that I want to advance. What are the chances? David, are you still out there?

Pointus Pilot

1990

(an autohistory by Paul Palmer)

1973 was a good year for falling in love. I was married to Marilyn Bancel and living in San Francisco surrounded by hippy culture near Dolores Park.

In the early seventies, Marilyn and I had returned from three years in Turkey with a whole busload of Turkish cloth, clothing and decorations, which we were selling out of our backyard on Hancock St.

Getting here wasn't the easiest thing. In 1968 I had returned from a year teaching Statistical Physics in the University of Copenhagen and I enrolled in the Folklore Dept. of Indiana University. I was enthralled with folk dancing and needed to learn how seriously I was going to take it. I thought I might just end up with a Masters in Folklore. Folklore was just coming out of its dark days, where misplaced English scholars had dragged it. These dinosauric obsessors with written language had gotten away with restricting folklore to just written/oral forms, such as lyrics, jokes and oral poems e.g. the Odyssey. Nothing could be studied that couldn't be written as a text. The students were revolting against this narrowness and wanted to include folk art, folk song, folk melodies, folk games and folk dancing. The times they were a-changing and quickly.

As soon as I arrived at IU I made my way to the local folk dance group which hosted many special characters. The leader was Marilyn, a local beauty with long blond hair down to her tookis. There was also Eran Fraenkel, an intense musician fascinated by common people worldwide who later made a career of bringing resources to the victims of war around the world. I remember Harry (Sparky) Jackendorff, a disturbed boy with the intense brilliance that goes with that condition. I forget most of the other dancers.

A month later, I was living with Marilyn off campus. She later told me that she saw me stroll into the dance the first time and saw my eyes light up when I saw her. “He’s so cocky” she thought to herself.

“He’ll never get me”. But life is funny that way.

I had been given a half-time appointment as a lecturer in the chemistry department. There were no duties that went along with this job but it still paid a nice salary, more than any student grant. The department chairman, Riley Schaeffer, had long had a dream of moving over into Anthropology himself and so he bent over backwards to lubricate my stay in the Folklore department. I could have taught some freshman chemistry but instead worked on developing a computer program for Riley so that a student could take the final exam as often as he wanted until he passed. If he once passed, that meant he knew the subject. If a student froze up or clutched at being tested, this was the way to give him a fair chance.

I had brought with me some cloth (called “shal”) I had collected in Turkey. I got the idea that it might make some nice clothing that might even become popular. A local seamstress turned it into a jacket for Marilyn and it was popular indeed. I proposed to Marilyn that she accompany me back to Turkey where we could collect fabrics, live on the coast in Bursa and hire women to do the sewing into clothing that we would export to her brother who, conveniently, lived in San Francisco. She had a little money saved up that would help us to get started. Unbelievably, her answer was “Sure! Why not?” Oh, to be young! She didn't really know me, she certainly didn't know Turkey and she had never run a business before. Of course it all worked out anyway.

We made arrangements with a freighter leaving New York for Italy and points East, including Istanbul, our destination. The captain agreed we could fill up my VW Microbus to the hilt with our goods and then they just lifted it like normal cargo and stored it in the hold. What a way to bring our whole world with us including cameras, tools, clothing, books and a record player with boxes of 12” LP records. The slowpokey boat finally exasperated us in Naples so we asked to get off early and just drove to Istanbul and Bursa. “Bursa on the coast” as I kept assuring Marilyn! But of course Bursa is 50 miles from the coast, which I remembered when we arrived in Bursa. Back then, no one had Google maps at their fingertips. So we changed plans and went over to Gemlik which is a small town, actually on the Marmara coast where we lived for three years.

PAUL MODELS SHAL SHIRT WHILE ON FREIGHTER

We found a nice little house to rent and got started collecting and sewing. Immediately there was a problem. Marilyn's parents belonged to the conservative Christian Science persuasion and actually cared that Marilyn and I were living “in sin” (their quaint phrase, not ours). Until we got married they would not release a penny of her small fortune to her. In San Francisco, for the sum of one dollar, I had joined the Universal Life Church and become a minister. Everyone was doing that. The idea was that as ministers we didn't have to pay any taxes. So it occurred to me that I could marry us. I sent one dollar for a marriage certificate and filled it out six months retroactively, long distance (in Indiana) and self married us, signing it with a proper flourish. Her parents' lawyer found it wanting still, so the next time we were up in Copenhagen selling our clothing, we attended the Tuesday, English language wedding ceremony at the City Hall (Rodhus). This was sufficient to open the tap with the dribble of life-supporting dollars that made life easier for a while. We didn’t take the formal marriage very seriously.

[Late breaking news: Fifty years later, in 2021, I learned that a friend of mine in Copenhagen who fancied herself a photographer, saw me getting married that day and took a picture though she didn’t approach me. I should have it soon.]

Life in Gemlik was fascinating. We lived in a local town apartment, on the ground floor beneath an older couple, Nevin and Cavit (pron. Javit). Cavit was a fisherman and came back every day during one summer with a basket full of palamut, a local mackerel. It was fabulous. We would all grill the fish and devour it for dinner. Sometimes he brought herring which we would also grill and eat whole, they being so small. This was olive country. Land wasn’t sold by the hectare (area) but by the quality and age of the olive trees on it. I learned how to go into the olive groves with the women and select “grass” for dinner. We would pick different kinds of leaves among the weeds and if they tasted good we would collect them in our baskets. Then we would fry up the leaves in butter and add rice for a meal. Nevin showed me that olives could be prepared without all the repellent salt. She sealed up a five gallon tin of olives in water and after a few months they were salt free and delicious. At harvest season, we would get wonderful, gigantic artichokes every day. We were able to climb up in the branches of a fully grown vishne tree and gorge on the ripe sour cherries. I learned the hard way why the feet of a chicken are tied before chopping off its head. Everyone rolled with laughter as I chased the headless chicken around the yard. As a foreigner, I enjoyed a different kind of masculine status by the neighborhood girls. One day, at a Zoroastrian kind of fire festival on the street, the girls took turns jumping over a fire and dancing around to recorded music, while I filmed, something they would not normally do in front of Turkish men. We watched typically Turkish oiled wrestling when a traveling wrestling band came through. The men, clad only in leather pants, covered themselves in olive oil so that they couldn’t get a good grip, and then wrestled each other to the ground. Marilyn bought a black Arab stallion that we kept in a small stable next to the house.

(End of part one)

ANYTHING INTO OIL – AN EXPOSÉ

In 1995, the world stage gave a belch and coughed up an actor determined to win fame and fortune. However this actor did not sing or dance. Instead he gave effect to the power of claims – specious and empty though they might be, claims to solve major problems of the world, to win wide admiration and acceptance. In this case his claim was modest. He only swore that he would solve the entire problem of too much garbage and also the absence of sufficient fuel oil in the world. Brian Appel ran a rendering plant in Carthage Missouri. Since rendering plants are not as common as they used to be, it may be worthwhile to explain to the reader that for hundreds or a thousand years, places where large quantities of animals were slaughtered for food, sold what they could for food and then gave all the excess, unsalable meat products to a renderer who would immerse them in steam or boiling water to remove all the oil and grease. When the water cooled, the grease could be skimmed off the top. Grease was valuable – the dessicated meats and bones less so. There were hundreds of such companies in the early United States, but the decomposition of the various products led to intensely repulsive odors, so rendering plants who could not deal effectively to reduce odors, were forced to close. Appel’s plant was fortunate to be located right next to a Con Agra turkey plant and so received a reliable source of turkey parts to process every day. Somehow Appel got the idea that his skimming of grease could be called by a fancier name, with seven syllables, namely THERMAL DEPOLYMERIZATION. One might think it the Achilles Heel of this new name that there were no obvious polymers being depolymerized but as the situation developed, that was not a problem. Not a single party on whom he laid this new name ever asked about the supposed polymers. Instead the new name was accepted on face value, not as an actual description of an actual process involving actual polymers but as a kind of magical process which ordinary mortals could not question. Appel pulled out all the stops. His claims, wildly mounting to the skies, told the world that he had invented a process that could convert all manner of waste materials into – and this is his term – light Texas crude. Yes, no longer recovered turkey grease but light Texas crude oil! He even offered a tentative list of the waste materials that could be converted by thermal depolymerization into light Texas crude oil. They included:

• Discarded tires,

• Refrigerators (thank you god, that he included this ridiculous choice),

• All hazardous waste,

• Medical waste

• Computers

• Turkey guts.

As he described his process, it included steam under pressure applied to these and other materials. Surely no one had ever subjected any of these items to steam before (well, leave out the refrigerators and other appliances for now). No one had learned before now that high pressure steam would convert tires to light Texas crude. No one ever went through all of hundreds of thousands of various chemical wastes to learn that they all shared one simple property. They could all be converted to light Texas crude using high pressure steam. In fact, anything that included carbon would be converted into oil. Yes, I am being sarcastic. There was nothing new going on here.

Somehow Appel’s claim came to the attention of Discover Magazine, a mag that once enjoyed a reasonable reputation among tinkerers and mechanically oriented readers. Discover sent out a reporter to bring back a story about this amazing breakthrough. He quickly established that the claim of light Texas crude was no joke, because he included a picture of Appel holding out a flask to him which seemed to contain a light brown liquid and by golly, it did seem to resemble light Texas crude.

I’m afraid this picture brought out my nasty streak. I have always imagined that Appel’s other hand was behind his back holding a half empty can, with punctures in the lid, marked Quaker State Oil. But I didn’t have any evidence of this. Just my fantasy.

As to the very impressive equipment that could carry out such a fantastical transformation of garbage into oil, there was a picture of a piece of equipment that could presumably produce steam and apply it to ground up turkey guts.. The Discover Magazine reporter wasn’t overly concerned with niggling details like seeing a tire (or a refrigerator) go inside the machine and seeing light Texas crude coming out. Surely he didn’t need to embarrass such a lion of chemical processing with a lot of silly questions, when the result was so secure. Imagine! All the garbage in the world – a huge amount – would be converted into needed oil, thus easing the world’s need for petroleum. What a boon for mankind!

Appel had claims galore. He had $40 MM from private investors and $12 MM from a government grant. Was any of it real? I’m skeptical but that’s just me. People of this stripe always report huge investments. I suppose it serves to put the idea into the heads of newcomers to the claims that this was a prime investment! He seemed to have a legitimate business processing turkey guts for ConAgra so he was not destitute. Actually I found a CWT (Changing World Technologies – Appel’s other name) website in 2018 so this fraud had legs.

It could not have been more obvious that these claims were fraudulent. A simple rendering plant had gone hoity toity and was being used for absurd claims that were ridiculous on their face. Clearly no chemist had been called in to find out if computers and refrigerators could be turned into oil. Hell, what about all the plastics and tires? These conversions don’t happen! Discover Magazine was completely taken in, apparently by its towering gullibility. The magazine should have subsequently published a blanket apology to its readers but this never happened. Instead it doubled down on this grand seller of magazine issues and repeated the claims over later years. In fact they helped Appel to spiral higher and higher, claiming exact quantities of water, metals and oil each input produced and to pontificate on the energy requirements for this Lego construction that mounted out of control. The amazing thing was that as his absurd claims became wilder, his admirers became more devoted. Those of us who create real things for a living are certainly barking up the wrong tree.

I was working on a theory called Zero Waste for eliminating all waste the hard way – by scientific research aimed at changing designs so that goods are designed for perpetual reuse. Having a charlatan claim to do it all with just steam! That was too much. I bridled and penned a blistering denunciation. Another friend named Paul who had already been needled by this kind of spurious claim, volunteered to mount my criticism on his website and there it stood for about five years.

The results were astounding. First, I was the lone voice in the United States – indeed, in the whole world – that was criticizing this obvious fraud. Not one other chemist that I ever heard of thought that turning refrigerators and computers (at least that!) into oil should be put down as a fraud on the public. Instead, I was contacted by chemistry students who thought they knew something whose argument ran along the lines of “well what if he’s right?” I even had one chemist from Shell Oil who fell for every one of Appel’s over the top claims and began adding up BTU’s and dollars to find out if they added up. Not one person who contacted me thought this was an obvious fraud.

A short while after the publication of the Discover article, Fortune magazine needed to get on the fraud hawking road and published a similar article, once again flogging this dead horse. I guess the people at Fortune ran into my public critique and so the chief editor of Fortune called me up one day to ask if I could supply him with three reasons why CWT was a fraud. I gave him fifteen and then the line went dead and presumably he went back to lick his wounds. At least Fortune never followed up on the absurd claims so far as I know, an endorsement I cannot offer Discover Magazine which published follow-ups three more times.

1. CWT and Appel claimed to have filed patents for its “technology”. Since the “technology” doesn’t actually exist (steam reforming is nothing new) the patents are pathetically empty of any substance. Nevertheless, it seems to be extremely rare for any of CWT’s boosters to actually look at the patents they are so eager to cite. In fact, in 2021, I discovered that CWT actually has a Wikipedia site that explores some history, citing its baseless claims as facts and never mentions a single criticism. However the more absurd claims seem to have slowly faded away, leaving only claims based on rendering turkey guts which are perfectly reasonable. In fact, CWT has gone through a typical history of rendering plants in which the neighbors attempt to shut it down due to emitted odors. Still, the fraud seems to still have legs, and must be attracting gullible investment because the turkey guts are subtly mixed with the other claims in an intellectual miasma that keeps shifting and bubbling so that it is not really possible to figure out what is being claimed at any one time. Turkey guts get mixed in with “wastes” and tires and then those disappear again leaving only turkey guts. But this is not my interest. I am only interested in the way that the American public was so easily taken in and how this was later repeated by other fraudsters again and again in later years.

   1. In order to seal the bargain, to show that these kinds of frauds repeat themselves endlessly, I am going to offer just a few juicy quotes from another conscious fraud in a technical field. This was called Theranos and it was created by Elizabeth Holmes who has not fared as well as Brian Appel in her public persona.

      She started Theranos on the fraudulent claim that she could do blood analyses using just one or two drops of blood. Her lover, Sunny Balwani, ran the company which achieved a one-time valuation of 9 billion dollars, making Elizabeth the richest woman in the US. They had a laboratory and manufacturing location in which, as one employee revealed, Balwani searched for surplus equipment that had the most gauges, controllers, connections and computers attached to it, and he connected up a hodgepodge of equipment to look like it was doing something very technical. Both of the founders are accused of $700 MM securities fraud by the SEC and their trials are coming up soon (2022). [Note: Holmes was sentenced in 2023 to 11 1/4 years in federal prison and a restitution of $452 million dollars.]

      My point, in raising the Theranos case, is that the fraud was based on technical claims which were false, it was prosecuted with malice and a lack of concern for truth or for victims and it relied on pictures of complicated equipment to impress its adherents and detractors. And also that the fraud has now been revealed by authorities so it is undeniable. These kinds of frauds are rampant. CWT was just an early one in my experience, and one that occurred in a field that I work in, waste materials.

      You can be sure that there are one or two similar business frauds going on right now. Will they be found out or will the perpetrators get away with it? Stay tuned!

      More news at: https://news.yahoo.com/sunny-balwani-elizabeth-holmes-ex-030235080.html

      _______________________________________________________________

      Note: This is a copy of the original Discover Magazine article from 2003 which is no longer easily available on the internet.

      Anything Into Oil

      Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year

      BRAD LEMLEY / Discover v.24, n.5, 1may03

      

      ---

      ---

      Gory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant In Carthage, Missouri, will no longer go to waste.. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerizatIon plant, recently completed In an adjacent lot, and be transformed Into various useful products, including 600 barrels of light oil.

      In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil. Really.

      "This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies (CWT), the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming."

      Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true.

      "Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

      Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end , he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that.

      "The potential is unbelievable," says Michael Roberts, a senior chemical engineer for the Gas Technology Institute, an energy research group. "You're not only cleaning up waste; you're talking about distributed generation of oil all over the world."

      "This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step," agrees Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist with the Paladin Capital Group and a former Bell Laboratories director.

      Andreassen and others anticipate that a large chunk of the world's agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the U.S. agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil. Referring to U.S. dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East, R. James Woolsey, former CIA director and an adviser to Changing World Technologies, says, "This technology offers a beginning of a way away from this."

      The offal-derived oil, Is chemically almost identical to a number two fuel oil used to heat homes.

      But first things first. Today, here at the plant at Philadelphia's Naval Business Center, the experimental feedstock is turkey processing-plant waste: feathers, bones, skin, blood, fat, guts. A forklift dumps 1,400 pounds of the nasty stuff into the machine's first stage, a 350-horsepower grinder that masticates it into gray brown slurry. From there it flows into a series of tanks and pipes, which hum and hiss as they heat, digest, and break down the mixture. Two hours later, a white jacketed technician turns a spigot. Out pours a honey-colored fluid, steaming a bit in the cold warehouse as it fills a glass beaker.

      It really is a lovely oil.

      "The longest carbon chains are C-18 or so," says Appel, admiring the liquid. "That's a very light oil. It is essentially the same as a mix of half fuel oil, half gasoline." Private investors, who have chipped in $40 million to develop the process, aren't the only ones who are impressed. The federal government has granted more than $12 million to push the work along. "We will be able to make oil for $8 to $12 a barrel," says Paul Baskis, the inventor of the process. "We are going to be able to switch to a carbohydrate economy."

      Making oil and gas from hydrocarbon-based waste is a trick that Earth mastered long ago. Most crude oil comes from one-celled plants and animals that die, settle to ocean floors, decompose, and are mashed by sliding tectonic plates, a process geologists call subduction. Under pressure and heat, the dead creatures' long chains of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon-bearing molecules, known as polymers, decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons. However, Earth takes its own sweet time doing this—generally thousands or millions of years—because subterranean heat and pressure changes are chaotic. Thermal depolymerization machines turbocharge the process by precisely raising heat and pressure to levels that break the feedstock's long molecular bonds.

      Many scientists have tried to convert organic solids to liquid fuel using waste products before, but their efforts have been notoriously inefficient. "The problem with most of these methods was that they tried to do the transformation in one step—superheat the material to drive off the water and simultaneously break down the molecules," says Appel. That leads to profligate energy use and makes it possible for hazardous substances to pollute the finished product. Very wet waste—and much of the world's waste is wet—is particularly difficult to process efficiently because driving off the water requires so much energy. Usually, the Btu content in the resulting oil or gas barely exceeds the amount needed to make the stuff.

      That's the challenge that Baskis, a microbiologist and inventor who lives in Rantoul, Illinois, confronted in the late 1980s. He says he "had a flash" of insight about how to improve the basic ideas behind another inventor's waste-reforming process. "The prototype I saw produced a heavy, burned oil," recalls Baskis. "I drew up an improvement and filed the first patents." He spent the early 1990s wooing investors and, in 1996, met Appel, a former commodities trader. "I saw what this could be and took over the patents," says Appel, who formed a partnership with the Gas Technology Institute and had a demonstration plant up and running by 1999.

      Thermal depolymerization, Appel says, has proved to be 85 percent energy efficient for complex feedstocks, such as turkey offal: "That means for every 100 Btus in the feedstock, we use only 15 Btus to run the process." He contends the efficiency is even better for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics.

      So how does it work? In the cold Philadelphia warehouse, Appel waves a long arm at the apparatus, which looks surprisingly low tech: a tangle of pressure vessels, pipes, valves, and heat exchangers terminating in storage tanks. It resembles the oil refineries that stretch to the horizon on either side of the New Jersey Turnpike, and in part, that's exactly what it is.

      Appel strides to a silver gray pressure tank that is 20 feet long, three feet wide, heavily insulated, and wrapped with electric heating coils. He raps on its side. "The chief difference in our process is that we make water a friend rather than an enemy," he says. "The other processes all tried to drive out water. We drive it in, inside this tank, with heat and pressure. We super-hydrate the material." Thus temperatures and pressures need only be modest, because water helps to convey heat into the feedstock. "We're talking about temperatures of 500 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures of about 600 pounds for most organic material—not at all extreme or energy intensive. And the cooking times are pretty short, usually about 15 minutes."

      Once the organic soup is heated and partially depolymerized in the reactor vessel, phase two begins. "We quickly drop the slurry to a lower pressure," says Appel, pointing at a branching series of pipes. The rapid depressurization releases about 90 percent of the slurry's free water. Dehydration via depressurization is far cheaper in terms of energy consumed than is heating and boiling off the water, particularly because no heat is wasted. "We send the flashed-off water back up there," Appel says, pointing to a pipe that leads to the beginning of the process, "to heat the incoming stream."

      At this stage, the minerals—in turkey waste, they come mostly from bones—settle out and are shunted to storage tanks. Rich in calcium and magnesium, the dried brown powder "is a perfect balanced fertilizer," Appel says.

      The remaining concentrated organic soup gushes into a second-stage reactor similar to the coke ovens used to refine oil into gasoline. "This technology is as old as the hills," says Appel, grinning broadly. The reactor heats the soup to about 900 degrees 'Fahrenheit to further break apart long molecular chains. Next, in vertical distillation columns, hot vapor flows up, condenses, and flows out from different levels: gases from the top of the column, light oils from the upper middle, heavier oils from the middle, water from the lower middle, and powdered carbon—used to manufacture tires, filters, and printer toners—from the bottom. "Gas is expensive to transport, so we use it on-site in the plant to heat the process," Appel says. The oil, minerals, and carbon are sold to the highest bidders.

      Depending on the feedstock and the cooking and coking times, the process can be tweaked to make other specialty chemicals that may be even more profitable that oil. Turkey offal, for example, can be used to produce fatty acids for soap, tires, paints, and lubricants. Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC—the stuff of house siding, wallpapers, and plastic pipes—yields hydrochloric acid, a relatively benign and industrially valuable chemical used to make cleaners and solvents. "That's what's so great about making water a friend," says Appel. "The hydrogen in water combines with the chlorine in PVC to make it safe. If you burn PVC [in a municipal-waste incinerator], you get dioxin—very toxic."

      

Brian Appel, CEO of Changing World Technologies, strolls through a thermal depolymerization plant In Philadelphia. Experiments at the pilot facility revealed that the process Is scalable—plants can sprawl over acres and handle 4,000 tons of waste a day or be "small enough to go on the back of a flatbed truck" and handle Just one ton daily, says Appel.

The technicians here have spent three years feeding different kinds of waste into their machinery to formulate recipes. In a little trailer next to the plant, Appel picks up a handful of one-gallon plastic bags sent by a potential customer in Japan. The first is full of ground-up appliances, each piece no larger than a pea. "Put a computer and a refrigerator into a grinder, and that's what you get," he says, shaking the bag. "It's PVC, wood, fiberglass, metal, just a mess of different things. This process handles mixed waste beautifully." Next to the ground-up appliances is a plastic bucket of municipal sewage. Appel pops the lid and instantly regrets it. "Whew," he says. "That is nasty."

Experimentation revealed that different waste streams require different cooking and coking times and yield different finished products. "Ifs a two-step process, and you do more in step one or step two depending on what you are processing," Terry Adams says. "With the turkey guts, you do the lion's share in the first stage. With mixed plastics, most of the breakdown happens in the second stage." The oil-to-mineral ratios vary too. Plastic bottles, for example, yield copious amounts of oil, while tires yield more minerals and other solids. So far, says Adams, "nothing hazardous comes out from any feedstock we try."

"The only thing this process can't handle is nuclear waste," Appel says. "If it contains carbon, we can do it."

This Philadelphia pilot plant can handle only seven tons of waste a day, but 1,054 miles to the west, in Carthage, Missouri, about 100 yards from one of ConAgra Foods' massive Butterball Turkey plants, sits the company's first commercial-scale thermal depolymerization plant. The $20 million facility, scheduled to go online any day, is expected to digest more than 200 tons of turkey-processing waste every 24 hours.

The north side of Carthage smells like Thanksgiving all the time. At the Butterball plant, workers slaughter, pluck, parcook, and package 30,000 turkeys each workday, filling the ai with the distinctive tang of boiling bird. A factory tour reveals the grisly realities of large-scale poultry processing. Inside, an endless chain of hanging carcasses clanks past knife-wielding laborers who slash away. Outside, a tanker truck idles, full to the top with fresh turkey blood. For many years, ConAgra Foods has trucked the plant's waste—feathers, organs, and other nonusable parts—to a rendering facility where it was ground and dried to make animal feed, fertilizer, and other chemical products. But bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, can spread among cattle from recycled feed, and although no similar disease has been found in poultry, regulators are becoming skittish about feeding animals to animals. In Europe the practice is illegal for all livestock. Since 1997, the United States has prohibited the feeding of most recycled animal waste to cattle. Ultimately, the specter of European-style mad-cow regulations may kick-start the acceptance of thermal depolymerization. "In Europe, there are mountains of bones piling up," says Alf Andreassen. "When recycling waste into feed stops in this country, it will change everything."

Because depolymerization takes apart materials at the molecular level, Appel says, it is "the perfect process for destroying pathogens." On a wet afternoon in Carthage, he smiles at the new plant—an artless assemblage of gray and dun-colored buildings—as if it were his favorite child. "This plant will make 10 tons of gas per day, which will go back into the system to make heat to power the system," he says. "It will make 21,000 gallons of water, which will be clean enough to discharge into a municipal sewage system. Pathological vectors will be completely gone. It will make 11 tons of minerals and 600 barrels of oil, high-quality stuff, the same specs as a number two heating oil." He shakes his head almost as if he can't believe it. "It’s amazing. The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't even consider us waste handlers. We are actually manufacturers—that's what our permit says. This process changes the whole industrial equation. Waste goes from a cost to a profit."

He watches as burly men in coveralls weld and grind the complex loops of piping. A group of 15 investors and corporate advisers, including Howard Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, stroll among the sparks and hissing torches, listening to a tour led by plant manager Don Sanders. A veteran of the refinery business, Sanders emphasizes that once the pressurized water is flashed off, "the process is similar to oil refining. The equipment, the procedures, the safety factors, the maintenance—it's all proven technology."

And it will be profitable, promises Appel. "We've done so much testing in Philadelphia, we already know the costs," he says. "This is our first-out plant, and we estimate we'll make oil at $15 a barrel. In three to five years, we'll drop that to $10, the same as a medium-size oil exploration and production company. And it will get cheaper from there."

"We've got a lot of confidence in this," Buffett says. "I represent ConAgra's investment. We wouldn't be doing this if we didn't anticipate success." Buffett isn't alone. Appel has lined up federal grant money to help build demonstration plants to process chicken offal and manure in Alabama and crop residuals and grease in Nevada. Also in the works are plants to process turkey waste and manure in Colorado and pork and cheese waste in Italy. He says the first generation of depolymerization centers will be up and running in 2005. By then it should be clear whether the technology is as miraculous as its backers claim.

EUREKA: Chemistry, not alchemy, turns (A) turkey offal—guts, skin, bones, fat, blood, and feathers—into a variety of useful products. After the first-stage heat-and-pressure reaction, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates break down into (B) carboxylic oil, which is composed of fatty acids, carbohydrates, and amino acids. The second-stage reaction strips off the fatty acids' carboxyl group (a carbon atom, two oxygen atoms, and a hydrogen atom) and breaks the remaining hydrocarbon chains into smaller fragments, yielding (C) a light oil. This oil can be used as is, or further distilled (using a larger version of the bench-top distiller in the background) into lighter fuels such as (D) naphtha, (E) gasoline, and (F) kerosene. The process also yields (G) fertilizer-grade minerals derived mostly from bones and (H) industrially useful carbon black.

Garbage In, Oil Out

Feedstock is funneled into a grinder and mixed with water to create a slurry that is pumped into the first-stage reactor, where heat and pressure partially break apart long molecular chains. The resulting organic soup flows into a flash vessel where pressure drops dramatically, liberating some of the water which returns back upstream to preheat the flow into the first-stage reactor. In the second-stage reactor, the remaining organic material is subjected to more intense heat, continuing the breakup of molecular chains. The resulting hot vapor then goes into vertical distillation tanks, which separate in into gases, light oils, heavy oils, water, and solid carbon. The gases are burned on-site to make heat and power the process, and the water, which is pathogen free, goes to a municipal waste plant. The oils and carbon are deposited in storage tanks, ready for sale.

— Brad Lemley

The thermal depolymerization process can convert a wide range of waste materials into oil and other useful by-products, in proportions that vary according to the specific type of feedstock run through the works:

Key: A=Grinder, B=First Reactor, C=Flash Vessel, D=Second Reactor, E=Distillation Tanks, F=Storage Tanks

A Boon to Oil and Coal Companies

One might expect fossil-fuel companies to fight thermal depolymerization. If the process can make oil out of waste, why would anyone bother to get it out of the ground? But switching to an energy economy based entirely on reformed waste will be a long process, requiring the construction of thousands of thermal depolymerization plants. In the meantime, thermal depolymerization can make the petroleum industry itself cleaner and more profitable, says John Riordan, president and CEO of

the Gas Technology Institute, an industry research organization. Experiments at the Philadelphia thermal depolymerization plant have converted heavy crude oil, shale, and tar sands into light oils, gases, and graphite-type carbon. "When you refine petroleum, you end up with a heavy solid-waste product that's a big problem," Riordan says. "This technology will convert these waste materials into natural gas, oil, and carbon. It will fit right into the existing infrastructure."

Appel says a modified version of thermal depolymerization could be used to inject steam into underground tar-sand deposits and then refine them into light oils at the surface, making this abundant, difficult-to-access resource far more available. But the coal industry may become thermal depolymerization's biggest fossil-fuel beneficiary. "We can clean up coal dramatically," says Appel. So far, experiments show the process can extract sulfur, mercury, naphtha, and olefins—all salable commodities—from coal, making it bum hotter and cleaner. Pretreating with thermal depolymerization also makes coal more friable, so less energy is needed to crush it before combustion in electricity-generating plants. — B.L.

Can Thermal Depolymerization Slow Global Warming?

If the thermal depolymerization process works as claimed, it will clean up waste and generate new sources of energy. But its backers contend it could also stem global warming, which sounds iffy. After all, burning oil creates global warming, doesn't it?

Carbon is the major chemical constituent of most organic matter—plants take it in; animals eat plants, die, and decompose; and plants take it back in, ad infinitum. Since the industrial revolution, human beings burning fossil fuels have boosted concentrations of atmospheric carbon more than 30 percent, disrupting the ancient cycle. According to global-warming theory, as carbon in the form of carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, it traps solar radiation, which warms the atmosphere—and, some say, disrupts the planet's ecosystems.

But if there were a global shift to thermal depolymerization technologies, belowground carbon would remain there. The accoutrements of the civilized world—domestic animals and plants, buildings artificial objects of all kinds—would then be regarded as temporary carbon sinks. At the end of their useful lives, they would be converted in thermal depolymerization machines into short-chain fuels, fertilizers, and industrial raw materials, ready for plants or people to convert them back into long chains again. So the only carbon used would be that which already existed above the surface; it could no longer dangerously accumulate in the atmosphere. "Suddenly, the whole built world just becomes a temporary carbon sink," says Paul Baskis, inventor of the thermal depolymerization process. "We would be honoring the balance of nature." — B.L.

To learn more about the thermal depolymerization process, visit Changing World Technologies' Web site: www.changingworldtech.com.

A primer on the natural carbon cycle can be found at www.whrc.org/science/carbon/carbon.htm

http://www.spiritofmaat.com/announce/newoil.htm

source: http://wmv.discover.com/issues/may-03/features/featoil/

Roughly twenty years ago an extraordinary event took place that I didn’t understand at first. I have been mulling it over ever since and I think I have some answers.

The federal government announced a brand new method for accomplishing a common goal. It was cheaper, easier and quicker. They convened an investigation into this method, decreeing at the end that it worked reliably. Most of the public was totally convinced. There were lots of places needing this new method to be applied, all over the world. What an opportunity to make a giant leap forward in engineering.

You might think that the next step the government would want to take would be to test out this new method in a variety of ways and places and configurations. The money savings alone were impressive. The job that had previously required the combined efforts and expertise of squads of expert engineers could now be done by a couple of guys with the right equipment. And the equipment was simply and universally available. What an opportunity!

But somehow the research never took place. The applications failed to materialize and I couldn’t figure out why. But now I know, and I will share it with the reader.

There is a large industry that calls itself the controlled demolition industry. These consist of highly experienced people who have seen all kinds of jobs and tried all kinds of approaches. One such is called Controlled Demolition of Phoenix Maryland. There are many more in Texas, such as Dallas Demolition in Dallas. They cause unwanted buildings to collapse into rubble. You can see what their work really looks like by going to

or for an introduction to the serious difficulties of planning a building take down, try

.

Designing the exact placement of hundreds of explosives is no walk in the park. Do it wrong and steel shrapnel can go flying out of the building to kill people or injure property a half mile away. Bring the building parts down in the wrong sequence and instead of landing on the nice empty parking lot, a building can lean over and fall sideways, destroying other structures that you are hired to protect. Mistakes can be costly, even lethal. And the cost is fabulous. Not only are explosives like C4 widely used, but also thermite.

When I was a fledgling chemist, I was intrigued, like so many of us are, with the release of sudden, great chemical energy. I made my share of gunpowder and turned it into a “rifle” shooting glass marbles out of conduit pipe. How all my fingers survived I will never understand. But the most intriguing of all was thermite, because I could make it from ingredients I could still buy at a hardware store - aluminum powder and iron oxide. I would mix them intimately, learning how hard it is to mix down to the micro level. Then I would get a ceramic bowl, or flowerpot, fill it with the mixture and set it off with a sparkler. The aluminum grabbed the oxygen from the iron oxide to become aluminum oxide and left iron behind. The reaction produced so much heat that the remaining iron melted filling the bottom of the holder. If in a flowerpot, the iron would run out of the hole in the bottom, glowing red hot or white hot. Very exciting stuff! When I learned more, I learned that the molten iron could be used to fill a crack and fuse two pieces of steel together (picture a cracked train rail). Or it could be directed against a piece of steel and melt it apart. Later, when I read about using thermite to cut steel beams in a controlled demolition, I knew exactly what they meant. These are not the explosions they talk about. Those can cut beams apart too, but in a violent way, by directing their power right against the steel. Thermite does the more controlled work, by directing white hot iron against steel until it melts. Commercial mixtures get much hotter than my simple experiment. And thermite leaves a lot of molten iron around, after the building is brought down. Nothing else does.

That is why the new method invented by the National Institute of Standards (NIST) was such a barn burner. It abjured explosives, relying instead on a raging fire of kerosene in an upper story of the building. NIST’s method could bring the building down on its own footprint, easily and reliably. NIST pointed to two tall buildings they had tried it on. In both cases, the approach worked perfectly. The cost, ten or twenty thousand gallons of kerosene, had an insignificant cost compared to all the expertise, preparation and expensive explosives needed by other methods. They even had a new name for the way that the buildings collapsed straight downward. They called it pancaking, an evocative name that caught the imagination of all who heard it. But one experiment, or even two, does not a successful research project make. In this first case in fact, there was still a problem. It seemed to be one of contagion, as the two collapsing buildings brought down another nearby building a few hours later by no mechanism that NIST could figure out. But that’s what research is for. There are buildings all over the world slated for demolition. This new method would surely be tested on dozens of them to iron out the kinks. The savings in cost could not be ignored.

Unfortunately, history has not dealt well with this new method of building demolition. To my knowledge, there has never been a single research demolition using the new NIST method. Anywhere! For some reason, the cheap, new method has been bottled up while the standard, expensive approach, using explosives, runs on apace. What can be going on behind the scenes?

Any new method for doing anything will have its critics and detractors. Knowledge proceeds in fits and starts, until at last, in the case of a truly innovative work, it conquers by force of its success. But if there is no test there can be no success.

The critics believe they know exactly why no further research is being carried out by NIST. For example, Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth, with professional members all around the world. They are quick to explain that NIST knows exactly what conclusion research would lead to. NIST would find that its new method has no validity at all, and in the first application, was granted a success by smoke and mirrors, hidden from the public. The critics, who include many experts such as physicists, chemists, architects and construction engineers, say that the original buildings were chock full of hidden explosives and thermite, controlled by a computer, and were not brought down by a kerosene fire at all. They even say that the third building, (Number 7), which collapsed a few hours later so mysteriously, was also full of explosives and was slated to be hit with its own airplane which somehow never showed up. You can’t deny that this alternate explanation makes a great deal of sense. When the critics go further and analyze the speed of collapse, and the chemical elements surprisingly found in the dust that settled everywhere, these additional research elements support their claims and destroy NIST’s claims. This dust? - ordinary collapse can’t pulverize concrete that way. And the pools of molten iron found in the basement afterward? This then, they claim, is the reason why no additional research has been carried out. Because NIST knows that their new method will emerge a failure, not a savior. But as any American citizen will tell you, their government never lies to the people. So amidst the clash of theories, an unfortunate cloud of uncertainty still hangs over the whole event. Perhaps a new administration will want to come clean and revisit the NIST hearings.

One can but hope!

Point-us Pilot

February, 2021

controlled demolition Inc. in Phoenix Maryland