Juno technology shown to significantly cut municipal carbon emissions

A waste recovery technology developed by US-based pulp and paper company Georgia-Pacific, can contribute significantly to helping municipalities in the US and abroad reduce the carbon emissions associated with current waste management practices, a new life cycle assessment (LCA) has shown. Called Juno, the technology can divert up to 90% of the municipal waste it processes away from landfills and incinerators, returning the recovered materials back into the economy for future reuse.

The third-party assessment was conducted by Sphera Solutions, a provider of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) consulting services. It measured Juno's potential impact compared to municipal solid waste landfills and energy-from-waste (EfW) disposal methods in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia using ISO 14044:2006 standards.

Juno fits into the collection or source separation processes already implemented in a municipality, requiring only that the unsorted  residential municipal solid waste or municipal-like commercial waste is taken to a Juno site, rather than landfilled or incinerated.

The technology uses steam, pressure, and heat to treat the waste. This pulps up the paper fiber, and solubilize the food. A patented wet waste processing solution then separates the paper fibres from the rest of the waste, while the solubilized food is carried away from the other recyclable materials, to be converted into biogas. Metals and rigid plastics are reclaimed with the help of standard material recovery facility equipment such as magnets, eddy currents, optical sorters, and other separators.

The findings of the LCA for each of three countries demonstrated that the technology could provide very considerable reductions in carbon emissions for the municipalities implementing the process. In the U.K., using a GWP20 model  - which measures the impact of the global warming potential over a 20-year period – it was calculated that every year that a Juno facility processes its annual capacity of 300,000 metric tonnes of waste instead of that waste being disposed in a landfill, it would reduce GWP20 by approximately 580,000 metric tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) - about 25 million trash bags of waste diverted for recycling instead of landfilled.

"An LCA provides a foundation for making quantitative comparisons between alternatives," said James Levis, principal consultant at Sphera Solutions. The study was critically reviewed by an international panel of three independent experts, who confirmed that it conformed to the relevant international standards, he added. It therefore provides a ‘strong foundation for comparing the potential environmental impacts from each of the studied alternatives’.

Corresponding impacts in the U.S. and Australia are illustrated in the graphs below.

"The primary sources of methane emissions are agriculture, natural gas systems, and landfills," said Nagapooja Seeba, Juno's director of environmental sustainability. "Methane breaks down to CO2 in approximately 12 years on average, so while methane is 29.8 times more potent than CO2 over 100 years, it is 82.5 times more potent over 20 years. That's the reason Juno is effective at reducing carbon emissions relative to landfills over 100 years but is even more effective over this shorter timeframe."

The first Juno commercial unit began processing local solid waste in Toledo, Oregon in May of 2021, with an annual capacity of 60,000 to 70,000 tons. In its first year of operation, Juno Oregon nearly tripled landfill diversion rates in Toledo. More and larger facilities are planned in the future.

The process was also trialled in King County, in Washington state from March through May 2023, during which 737 tons of waste were processed– equivalent to about 29,000 trash bags – and diverting an average of 46% of materials from a regional landfill that is projected to reach capacity by 2031.

Juno aims to build two additional plants in the U.K. within the next five years, with additional plans to develop more facilities in the U.S. and expand to Australia.