Waste to energy, Colombia

Project name: Waste to energy: Used tires circular economy

Project location: Colombia

Website: https://volksjagger.wixsite.com/wtetires

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WTEtires

Project description:

An integral plant featuring patented technology for the processing of waste tires into energy, and raw industrial materials; This kind of plant stablish a circular economy system for special and/or hazardous waste such as used tires.
This plant operates 100% electrically, and is self sustainable as it produces it's own electricity, avoiding the burning of fossil fuels or using the waste tires as TDF thus avoiding outputting NOx and SOx particles to the atmosphere; It's operation utilizes IR radiant energy to sublimate the waste material, taking advantage of the difference in the emissivity index of the reactor vessel and the organic, vulcanized waste, though other organic based wastes are susceptible of being transformed in this plant.
The project is at a mature stage, we base our planning on the technical feasibility report we ordered form USA based laboratory Advaced Fuel Research, from which we received a very encouraging debriefing letter, and a highly positive financial feasibility report built using the official chamber of commerce of Bogota entrepreneurship tool.
We have built a simple, scaled down prototype and achieved proof of concept.
This project is intended to be a game changer for communities off the electric grid, as it will prove to bring social and economical development to areas lacking conduction or generation, or areas heavily polluted due to the historic use of fossil fuels for energy generation and poor waste management.
It will also complement other renewable and clean energy projects, for example, the new electric mass transport busses implemented in the TM fleet in Bogota, or the projected electric tramways.
It also opens the door for further R&D on advanced materials for the tech industry such as graphenes, Boudoir carbons, sulfur rich activated carbons specially effective against oil and mercuric spillages, as well as synthetic aromatic hydrocarbons (BTX) for the petrochemical industry.

Goal and purpose of the project:

Our goal is to fight climate change, and linear economic models which negatively impact our enviroment and societies; We aim at creating a social tool which will allow vulnerable communities to determine their self development by means of building a community owned productive facility which will provide clean renewable energy, jobs and raw materials for other industries.
We are committed with empowering people, and encouraging them to replicate their experience so we can achieve a factor of engagement multiplication.
We specifically plan to reduce the amount of CO2 associated to energy production, as well as providing a reliable standardized method for the management of the waste at the time we add value to it's final disposal, in order to reduce the volume of the waste stockpiling on the streets, on body waters or those that are burned in the open by the scavengers trying to obtain steel from radial tires.

Motivation of the applicant / applicant team:

The long and difficult road we have behind, is our main motivation to keep going into the future.
I started this project on my own, as a way to address the waste tire crisis that took place at my city between 2012 and 2015, and since then, many people has collaborated and engaged with the project, it is very interesting and attractive; After receiving the encouraging reports from the USA based lab and our local management and entrepreneuership experts, I decided to build with my own limited resources a simple scaled down prototype, and it demonstrated that we achieved proof of concept. After that success, I decided to submit my idea to the national intellectual rights authority, the SIC.
It was a very hard process without any legal or technical support, but after a couple of months I managed to fulfill all the requirements and I was issued my first invention patent.
Now, I need to build the actual, full featured, full scale version of the last revision of my reactor design, in order to find an investor, and assemble a R&D team of young professionals working in a multidisciplinary context for standardizing the plant, processes and products for it's final implementation and operation. It is time to make it real, join our team!

Use of prize money:

The money will be used on the construction, operation, testing and reporting of the first full scale prototype, to make any adjustements needed, to obtain analysis such as chromatographic sampling, and for the project promotion on social media and digital contents, in order to raise public awareness of our technology, and in order to find financial support.