Temarry Recycling, of Tecate, California, has invested $100,000 to renovate its waste-to-energy system processes to improve the efficiency of the WTE process, the company reports in a press release.

Temarry’s WTE process has been operating at its Mexico facility, Recicladora Temarry, for the last seven years, the company says, explaining that it is an integral part of the company’s closed loop recycling system that uses hazardous waste solids such as rags and debris to generate steam to power recovery stills.

The company says the system provides generators of hazardous materials a desirable and cost effective alternative to the industry standard of shipping waste solvents and flammable solids to the Midwest for fuel blending.

A major part of the investment is a new injection system for cooling combustion chambers. The company says the thermal treatment process must maintain an operating temperature of between 1500 and 1800 degrees F. When feeding high energy waste, such as solvent-laden rags, combustion chambers must be cooled down immediately, the company says. In the old system, water was injected into the combustion chambers to achieve this cool down. The new system draws steam from the system’s 200-horsepower boiler and mixes it with the water, resulting in an increase of the injection temperature from ambient to about 200 degrees F.

The company says the primary benefits of their new system are the reduction in volume of purchased water for cooling down the combustion chambers, the ability to feed waste faster because of a reduction in temperature extremes and a reduction in the use of propane to bring the temperature back up. All benefits represent a reduction in the use of natural resources and improve the sustainability of these resources, Temarry says.

The company says that over the past year, the amount of flammable solids shipped to Temarry by generators from the Western U.S. has doubled. In order to accommodate this increase and anticipated future increases it was critical to complete this renovation, Temarry says.