Re: FW: General inquiry from the Milk Pail Market

[Bruce England]

Hi Steve:

In the interest of honoring folks' privacy, I'm going to Bcc copy the individuals on the task force who I most believe might like to get in touch with you (Janis re waste in general, Jane re polystyrene, and James re cogeneration) (I'm including the relevant working groups as well, in case interest is there from anyone else). I believe that I was going to provide contact info to you from someone outside of the task force, but I don't recall now who it might have been. Do you?

BTW, if you would like a copy of the green business application for your business type, I would be happy to get that to you. Let me know!

Bye for now!
Bruce

At 10:30 AM -0700 9/15/08, Steve wrote:

 

 

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From: Steve [mailto:st...@milkpail.com]
Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2008 10:10 PM
To: 'mv-sust-task...@googlegroups.com'
Subject: General inquiry from the Milk Pail Market

 

Hello folks,

 

Recently the Milk Pail took three very interesting steps to dramatically reduce our waste stream to the landfill.

 

The three actions were;

 

1)       diverted our produce greens from the dumpster to bins which are used by local farms for animal feed.

2)       Set aside our polystyrene foam boxes that our grapes, asian pears and other delicate fruits arrive in and we are now exploring local ways to densify and supply post consumer users of this product.  We have discovered that there appears to be NO Santa Clara County facility for this !

3)       The wax cardboard which can not be recycled is now being baled and sent to our cardboard recycler for no charge.  We have learned that wax boardŠ which has something like 14,000 BTU of energy per lb of material  ( wood = +/- 8,400 BTU per lb. ) is not accepted for cogeneration purposes at the two Northern California waste to energy plants.  We are investigating this by contacting national consulting firms who specialize in cogeneration operations.  We think that the industry may have never been introduced to this idea.  The volume of wax board to the landfills in this country is enormous.

 

I understand that the City is moving forward with a commercial composting pilot program that would use post consumer food waste ( restaurant food, meat scraps etc.)

 

If any of the readers to this organization have information to share regarding either polystyrene foam densifying operations or have experience with the rules and regulations overseeing cogeneration plants I would be thankful.

 

Many thanks

Steve Rasmussen

Owner

The Milk Pail Market