There are a few bedrock principals that we all base our solid waste handling designs upon: recycle, reuse, and circular economy. We do not even bother to calculate and compare anymore — we know that the best answer is to recycle. However, it may be time to discuss if this is still true when we are dealing with global warming. Learn the effects of treating organic solid wastes differently: as carbon captured from the atmosphere and turned into consumer products.

The discussion will start with a summary of the types of solid wastes municipalities deal with — two-thirds of which are organic with carbon that came from the atmosphere. Discover an alternative pathway for the organic portion of solid wastes called sequestration. The presentation will explain how dry conditions have stored organic carbon for hundreds of years. The session finishes with a quick economic summary showing that these wastes may be worth $200/ton as carbon credits and an open discussion tackling the question: Is recycling always the right answer?

---

About the Speaker

Evan Nyer
Founder | Carbon Captured Naturally

"I have been an Environmental Engineer for over 50 years. It all started when I was 19 and Purdue set me up with 3 professors and together we developed an individual engineering program to become an environmental engineer. When I was 23 I was the senior technical representative on two wastewater treatment design teams for chemical plants. At 29, I wrote my first book, “Groundwater Treatment Technology”. For the next 30 years I wrote, taught and designed treatment systems for groundwater and soil all over the world. The one constant during all of this was that biological systems were always the workhorse in removing unwanted chemicals from any environment. Fast forward to 2020 and I find myself retired and the world facing its next environmental crisis – Global Warming. The strange thing is that I could not find anyone that is applying biological methods to help solve this problem. So, I came out of retirement to see if biological systems could help. It turns out that it is not that hard or expensive (<$50/ton) to capture and sequester CO2 using plants. Our first technology has just been awarded a patent, and we have formed a company, “Carbon Captured Naturally” to bring this technology to the field."