Local leaders gathered in Portsmouth Thursday to celebrate a facility meant to transform how the region deals with trash.
Earlier this year, the Southeastern Public Service Authority, which handles municipal waste for South Hampton Roads and western Tidewater, finalized a 20-year contract with Colorado-based AMP.
The company uses artificial intelligence to remove recyclable materials from the trash stream, including organic waste that can be converted into a reusable substance called biochar.
“This agreement represents the largest recycling project in the United States,” Portsmouth Mayor Shannon Glover said at Thursday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. “We’re proud that it’s here.”
The project grew out of an existential issue for SPSA.
Until 2024, 80% of the trash it collected went to the Wheelabrator plant in Portsmouth, where it was burned to produce steam energy. But that facility closed, leaving the waste authority to take roughly a thousand more tons of trash each day to the Regional Landfill in Suffolk.
Meanwhile, the landfill is running out of space, with no room to expand because of restricted wetlands. Even after an expansion currently underway, the facility would fill up by 2060, according to SPSA.
The goal of the new contract is to extend the landfill's life through the end of this century, while boosting recycling.
The $450 million deal guarantees AMP will keep at least half of the waste SPSA collects from going to the landfill. The company is expected to invest about $200 million in infrastructure.
AMP has been operating out of the Portsmouth plant in recent years through a pilot project with Recycling and Disposal Solutions of Virginia.
Under the SPSA deal, the company expanded its capacity and will process 108,000 tons of waste per year – about a quarter of what SPSA collects.
Another, larger facility is planned down the road on Victory Boulevard, the site of the former Wheelabrator plant, and will quadruple the project’s capacity.
On Thursday, AMP founder Matanya Horowitz gave a tour of the facility, pointing out where trash is dumped and flows through a series of sorting mechanisms, including cameras that quickly identify desirable items.
“These high-speed conveyor belts take the garbage, move it really fast, throw it over a waterfall and little jets of air push out the stuff we want.”
That stuff is any material that has a market, largely metals and plastics.
Organic waste, such as food and yard scraps, will be heated in a specialized kiln and turned into biochar, which can be used to control odor at landfills or in products such as concrete and fertilizer. Biochar also sequesters carbon.
AMP recently signed an agreement with Google to use the method to prevent 200,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere by 2030, as well as pursue ways to use biochar to mitigate emissions from methane, a potent greenhouse gas released from the breakdown of organic material, including at landfills.
Earlier this year, an outside firm reviewed the Portsmouth facility’s operations to ensure the technology fulfills contract terms.
The analysis by SCS Engineers found that of about 513 tons processed at the Portsmouth plant during three days, AMP recovered 130 tons of recyclables and 234 tons of material for biochar, a diversion rate well over the required 50%.
The project is likely to change how local governments choose to recycle, possibly eliminating separate blue bins altogether.
SPSA works with Norfolk, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach, Franklin and the counties of Southampton and Isle of Wight.
The estimated annual 22,000 tons of recyclables to come from the new project is about the same as what is recycled through the blue-bin system throughout the Southside, according to the waste authority.
“That became very attractive to our member communities because they were paying exorbitant amounts of money to recycle, and we were going to be able to recycle for less than they were currently recycling,” executive director Dennis Bagley said in a video played at the ribbon-cutting.
Portsmouth, for example, is already all-in on the new process. Trash trucks are collecting material from both bins and taking it to AMP’s plant.
