Dive summary:

• The Lake County, Indiana solid waste chairman has announced he is finished with unproven methods of trash disposal and instead plans on focusing solely on the more conventionally tested methods.
• This decision comes shortly after the board decided to cancel the more than four-year-old waste-to-energy contract with Powers Energy of America, which had caused the county a handful of problems.
• Chairman David Hamm says most processes of waste-to-energy have not been fully tested and are slow to develop or are not established and do more damage than good to the county waste process.

From the article:

In recent weeks, Lake County Commissioner Gerry Scheub, D-Schererville, once the trash-to-ethanol plan's biggest political proponent, has said he now has other alternative trash processing proposals on his desk, including a trash-to-diesel concept.

But most of the trash-to-fuel proposals in the country have been slow to develop or are not established. Hamm said he doesn't want Lake County to be a test site.

"I'm going to be wary of any process that sounds like something we just went through," Hamm said. The county has had several years of missed promises and deadlines in the attempted development of a trash-to-ethanol facility in Schneider. ...