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Eco-Fuel II will sell for about the same price as coal or natural gas, which is well below the going rate for imported oil. Says CEA President Robert Beningson: "The market for resource recovery is almost limitless." Beningson, a man who thinks big, estimates that if all the garbage in the country were converted to powdered fuel, it would add the equivalent of 2 million bbl. a day to the nation's oil supplies, or about the same amount as the oil that will flow through the Alaska pipeline at peak capacity.
But technology does not always keep pace with ambition. Monsanto, after successfully experimenting with a small-scale advanced system that burned solid waste with very little oxygen to produce synthetic oil or gas, set up a recovery plant in Baltimore. Under the larger-scale operating conditions, snarls developed in the conveyor belt that fed trash into the kiln. That, among other technical problems, led Monsanto to give up, but the city of Baltimore continues to work on the plant, hoping to make it succeed. The cost of building garbage-processing plants is high too; Raytheon is spending $50 million to put up one in Monroe County, N. Y.
An even greater problem is the hostility of residents living near sites proposed for garbage-processing plants and storage areas. CEA's plant in East Bridgewater is presently shut down for repairs of damage caused by an explosion in November. Company officials speculate that the blast could have been the work of people wanting to stop shipments of raw garbage into the neighborhood. Says New York's Vaccarello: "We have the processes to clean up waste matter, but it will take time to clean up garbage's bad image."