Hughes Energy LLC has spent the last several years trying to get into several counties in New York, including Delaware, Washington, Warren, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster, and now Orange. They have been rejected by all of them, plus Palm Beach County, Florida. They make claims of “successful plants in Europe,” but they do not provide any proof, citing NDA agreements.
One can find plenty of information about how promising autoclave technology was in Europe from 2004 to 2016. Sadly, it did not live up the promises and has mostly been abandoned (researchgate.net/publication/326231411_Evolution_of_Mechanical_Heat_Treatment_for_resource_recovery_from_Municipal_Solid_Waste_in_the_UK).
One can also learn about the tragic explosion of an autoclave that took a man’s life at the Sterecycle (with an e not an i) in Rotherham, UK (youtube.com/watch?v=uDgY64bux2k).
If Tom Wilson’s patented autoclave technology has been “successfully installed and operated several times in Europe,” I wonder why Wilson Bio-Chemical, Hughes partner and the patent holder, are £968,035 ($1,210,000) in debt on the UK company registry website find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/05849628/filing-history?
What happened the first time Brendan Hughes and Tom Wilson tried to sell their autoclave technology stateside? In 2013, a previous incarnation of Hughes Energy Group, Resource, Recycling and Recovery (Re3) USA LTD, released a marketing pamphlet called “The Cutting Edge of Waste Conversion and Recycling.” On page 8, Brendan Hughes is named as the president, director, founder and CEO of Re3 and Tom Wilson the chief engineer and designer of “The Wilson System” that Re3 was attempting to market. This the is the same technology that Hughes Energy is trying to sell in Goshen today (slideshare.net/iCAN-Global/the-cutting-edge-of-waste-conversion-and-recycling-19603717).
No one fell for their claims back then — perhaps because the technology had proven to be a stunning failure in Europe? I hope that Goshen officials and residents will research and verify all claims made by Hughes Energy before allowing this potentially disastrous facility to finally find a location for their first factory in the United States. If something sounds too good to be true...
Judith Maguire
Delaware County