Liquid Environmental Solutions collects grease and other liquid wastes from restaurants, supermarkets, school cafeterias and other such sites. Craton Equity Partners sees it as a growth business.
The Los Angeles-based private equity firm has put $20 million into the Dallas-based disposal and recycling company to help it expand its reach, the Dallas Business Journal reports.
Since 2002, LES has built up a fleet of trucks that collect grease and other liquid wastes from about 15,000 locations and carry it back to its six treatment centers. Those centers pull contaminants from the grease, recover hydrocarbons and other recyclable materials and leave treated water as an end product.
The main benefit for customers is avoiding the headaches of disposing of their grease and complying with all the rules for doing so. Grease trap overflows can cost city sewer systems hundred of millions of dollars a year in cleanup costs, LES says (If you've ever wondered how a grease trap works, click here).
That's why companies like LES get paid to take it off customers' hands. Any money it can make by selling recycled byproducts is an added bonus.
That fact is built into the business plans of many companies seeking to make biofuel or other useful byproducts from waste, from garage-scale grease-to-biodiesel outfits to those seeking to grow to industrial-scale production.
Companies like Enerkem, Fulcrum BioEnergy, Range Fuels and Coskata are looking to turn trash into syngas, then turn that syngas into biofuel (see Green Light post).
Other companies like Ze-gen, Environmental Power's Microgy subsidiary and Nexterra Energy plan to make syngas from waste and use it to generate electricity or heat (see Biofuels and Electricity Take Out the Trash and The Iron Man of Greentech Gets $20M).
Of course, the economics of biofuels are still challenging, and none of the companies promising "next generation" biofuels from non-food sources like grasses, wood chips, corn cobs or mixed municipal waste have gotten to commercial production scale yet (see Biofuels: Are We There Yet?).
That might make the intermediary role that LES plays – collect the waste, treat it to regulation quality and sell the leftovers to others to make into useful products – a safer bet at present. Tom Soto, Craton managing partner, told the Dallas Business Journal that LES is "fully on track for profitability."
Still, major waste haulers are eager to jumpstart new, more cost-effective ways to turn trash to treasure.
Nationwide trash collection giant Waste Management, for example, has invested an undisclosed amount in Terrabon, which wants to turn trash into organic salts to make into fuel and chemicals. Big oil refiner Valero is also an investor in the Houston-based startup (see Green Light post).
The costs of building commercial-scale waste-to-fuel plants also have companies looking at alternatives. Sierra Energy wants to convert steel furnaces to make biogas, and biobutanol maker Gevo and biochemical maker Genomatica are both eyeing idled ethanol plants that can be converted to make their preferred end products (see Syngas From Steel Mills and Green Light post).
