One Man's Trash…

Cryptic Moth traveled through the Virginias to Tennessee. With some time to kill before our shoot on Monday we decided to stop by Dupont's newest project – a distillation plant that will soon make bio-based nylon (PDO) called Sorona.



It will take some 6.4 million bushels of corn (requiring 40,000 acres) to produce 100 million pounds of the material and they expect to sell $200 million worth by 2010. And while that's a drop in the 5.4 billion pound bucket for global nylon consumption, just 240 million pounds of Sorona would offset greenhouse gasses equivalent to 115,000 cars.



Unfortunately, there weren't any communications people working on a Sunday so we took some exteriors from across the valley and drove on to our next locale.



With so much open space, Tennessee isn't a place you'd expect to find a solution to landfills. But it is.



Waste Away (www.bouldincorp.com) takes municipal garbage from the town of Morrison – including food waste, plastic, metal, you name it – and then sort, grind, wash and treat the materials into what they call "fluff."



They recently took all the non-recyclable materials from the local Bonnaroo Festival, which was orchestrated by Lee ( scalarparty.livejournal.com) - CMP's number one fan and eco-coordinator for Bonnaroo.



Fluff is basically a mixture of organic and synthetic materials that can be turned into three applications. The first and most popular is used in agriculture as a replacement for peat moss. According to Tim, the company's president, the process makes the fluff completely benign without any risk of the plastic leeching into the soil.



This park bench and building blocks represent the second application.



By adding larger plastic chunks and heating the fluff in an extruder they are able to form the material into a variety of forms – like this rest area.



They are also working on using fluff as a potential energy source to power the plant itself. Not surprisingly, the people most psyched about the technology are from overseas – where land is a bit more valuable. Nevertheless, Tim definitely saw a day where mining landfills could be an economic engine.



The shooting was hot (like everywhere these days) and the smell, repugnant.



Cryptic Moth would like to thank Teddy and Tim for showing us around and proving that what we throw away indeed has value.




Out.

I+G