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Tuesday
Sep202011

Eco-Industrial Park

 

The Eco-Industrial Park is planned an area adjacent to Captain's Cove Marina and Seaside Park on either side of the Cedar Creek inlet.  This area of town has several important attributes that lends itself to the creation of an Eco-Industrial Park: reliable electrical interconnections to the grid, access to natural gas, significant amounts of excess heat and gray water that can be harnessed to serve the district , and incredible transportation access via highway, rail and water, all within a ¼ mile radius of each other.

Plans for the park will include the following:

  • Renewable Energy Facility - 50 acre park located on a closed landfill will be dedicated exclusively to wind and solar energy generators.  It has the potential to generate about 5 megawatts of power which can be sold to nearby by industrial facilities.
  • Anaerobic Digester for Food Waste - a private developer will build, own, and operate an anaerobic digester to handle the region’s food waste.  The digester will breakdown food anaerobically and its byproducts will be used for fertilizer.
  • Anaerobic Digester for Sewage - the City of Bridgeport is working to add an anaerobic digester to its west-side sewage treatment facility.  The digester will convert sewage sludge to methane gas that can be used for electricity.  It will also reduce the City’s carbon footprint by eliminating the need to truck its sewage to New Haven where it is currently burned.
  • Mattress Recycling Facility - this is a joint venture with two local non-profits Green Team and Family Re-Entry.  This facility will breakdown old mattresses and recycle their parts (metals and plastics) for sale or other purposes (more info here).
  • Bio-Fuels Production Facilities - this is a joint venture with Bridgeport Bio-Diesel which, currently reuses yellow grease as a biofuels feedstock and is expanding to use brown grease too, and an algae developer that plans to use oil produced from algae grown indoors as a biofuels feedstock.  The two companies hope to introduce their biofuels into the home heating market sometime in the future.
  • Construction Debris Recycling & Clean Fueling Station - Enviro-Express plans to expand their facilities to include a construction debris recycling program.  Currently they operate a natural gas fueling station that services regional garbage trucks and other private fleet vehicles.

 

The impetus for concentrating all these activities in one location is “industrial symbiosis.”  Utilizing the waste streams from some of the present facilities as a feedstock, fuel, or other purpose for adjacent facilities is the simplest way to save energy.  For example, the excess CO2 from our mass burn solid waste incinerator can be used to feed the algae in the biofuels production facilities.  Gray water from the sewage treatment facility that currently pumps into Long Island Sound can be used to cool down the combustion engines at the mass burn facility (which currently uses 1 million gallons of potable drinking water a day for that purpose).   The environmental and financial savings are both real and significant.

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