Rob Valceschini needed to buy a new suit this month.
After all, when you're standing in the spotlight with top-ranking political and trade figures from the United States and China, you can't show up in the jeans and boots that are common around the modest offices of Applied Soil Water Technologies LLC.
But while the company's presence in a nondescript industrial building in a strip building on East Glendale Avenue is anything but flashy, the company's big dreams got a big boost last week with the formal signing of a deal with a Chinese company to begin building facilities that convert municipal waste to energy.
Applied Soil Water Technologies everyone simply calls it ASW will bring its expertise in landfill permitting and design to the deal.
Shanghai Shengong Environmental Protection Co. Ltd., the partner of the Sparks company, brings boatloads of capital to the deal as well as the waste-to-energy technology that it's developed.
Stephen Morrow, a principal in the firm along with Valceschini, says the partnership is in advanced contract negotiations with a couple of U.S. cities and has more in the pipeline.
The deal that the joint venture offers is this: In exchange for the rights for the entire trash flow from a city, ASW and Shanghai Shengong will build a plant that captures recyclable metal, glass, plastic and construction materials from the trash stream and uses much of the rest to generate energy.
A facility capable of handling 500 to 750 tons of municipal solid waste a day the waste produced by a city the size of Reno would cost about $85 million.
Cities that enter into a deal with ASW and Shanghai Shengong won't pay anything for the facilities, which are expected to reduce the flow of refuse into landfills by 85 percent. And if municipal governments are currently paying to sort recyclables out of the trash stream, the partnership's deal allows them to save that cost because it works with an unsorted stream.
ASW and Shanghai Shengong expect to turn a profit through the sale of materials they recover, the energy they produce and the tax credits that are available for environmental facilities.
The formal signing of the partnership agreement came during the high-profile U.S. China-Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum in Chicago last week, part of the weeklong visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao and 300 Chinese executives.
So how does a little seven-year-old company with about 15 employees in Sparks plus another five in a Michigan office land a potentially huge contract with a Chinese partner?
For starters, appearances are deceiving. ASW carries outsized clout.
"In landfill permitting and design, we are arguably the best in the world," says Valceschini matter-of-factly.
From selecting landfill sites to managing their construction to overseeing their closure, ASW has worked with some of the biggest names in the waste-collection business.
It uses similar knowledge and systems to design and build other facilities such as waste-containment ponds for Churchill County dairy farms and heap-leach pads for eastern Nevada gold mines.
Along the way, ASW acquired a patented technology that transforms liquid metals into granules the technology had some mining industry applications and found a market for it in Chinese smelters.
And that relationship, in turn, brought ASW to the attention of Shanghai Shengong as it prepared to launch its waste-to-energy system into global markets.
These days, the business cards of Morrow and Valceschini are printed in English on the front and Chinese on the back. A Chinese-language version of ASW's Web site is available with a single click.
As they stand on the edge of new business that potentially could bring a five-fold increase in the size of their staff, Valceschini and Morrow want to ensure that they protect the company's strengths.
"We have a really good base of people that we can count on," says Morrow. "We don't want to grow too fast, to get ahead of ourselves."
SIDEBAR
What's the difference?
The waste-to-energy technology involved in the partnership of Applied Soil Water Technologies and Shanghai Shengong Environmental Protection Co. differ in a couple of key respects from a waste-to-energy plant planned east of Sparks.
The plant at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center to be developed by Fulcrum BioEnergy of Pleasanton, Calif., will use pre-sorted municipal waste as a feedstock.
The partnership of ASW and Shanghai Shengong will use a non-sorted stream of waste. Instead of sorting out recyclables, either at the curbside or at a sorting plant, the companies expect to hire about 120-150 people to handle sorting at their plants.
Products of the Fulcrum BioEnergy plant will be ethanol, electricity and chemical products.
ASW and Shanghai Shengong will sell recovered recyclables and and the energy that's created when organic materials are digested in an anerobic system.
