All Erection installs key piece of equipment at the Vadxx plant

Leaders of a pioneering facility in southeast Akron were hot to install a huge piece of key equipment.

Monday, they did just that at the under-construction Vadxx Energy LLC plant.

Actually, two cranes did much of the work to install an 80-foot-long, 175,000-pound kiln. It will be used to melt tons of scrap plastic every day, helping turn the material into liquid fuel at the Vadxx plant.

“This is so outside the norm,” said Lars Traner of Schenker Inc., the freight company that oversaw shipping of the German-made equipment to the Port of Cleveland late last year.

Traner is impressed with the size of the custom-built steel kiln — it is 12 feet high and from the outside looks like an enormous pipe — and its unusual purpose: recycling otherwise unrecyclable plastic.

At least initially, the plastic that will be melted at the $20 million facility — at Kelly Avenue and East Waterloo Road — will be “post-industrial” waste. That’s scrap plastic left over from manufacturing operations, not plastic that individuals throw in the trash.

The facility will be Vadxx’s first. It will transform the melted plastic, using a patent-pending process, into diesel fuel.

“Once we have got this plant working, our opportunities for expansion will improve,” said Tony Colello, one of the first managers hired for the Akron operation. “It’s like any new technology: Prove it and they will build it.”

Vadxx officials have stressed that they want the Akron operation to become the start of a U.S., or even global, expansion for the Northeast Ohio company, following several years of research and development. Vadxx has operated a pilot plant for several years in downtown Akron.

The massive kiln, along with a combustion chamber, were installed Monday as part of the plan to get the facility operational by June, said Russell Cooper, Vadxx’s vice president of supply and marketing. The plant, which will employ about 18, should be at capacity — 60 tons of waste plastic daily — by late this year.

The waste-to-energy industry, still emerging in the United States, is much further along in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. So it’s no surprise that Vadxx partner Rockwell Automation turned to Europe, specifically Germany, to find a manufacturer of the kiln and combustion chamber.

Rockwell Automation designed and is overseeing construction of the plant.

Both the kiln and the combustion chamber arrived in Cleveland in mid-December, after being shipped from Antwerp, Belgium. They were loaded onto trucks and arrived in Akron over the weekend.

Two escort cars and a police cruiser accompanied the oversize freight on its trip along Interstate 77. Schenker also arranged for transportation to Akron.

The Vadxx facility is on former city-owned land next to a business/industrial park. EPA officials say the plant will be a minor pollution emitter.

The nearly clear, odorless emissions from the plant will be no more than what would be generated by a building’s boiler, Vadxx officials have said.