The possibility that the Renewable Environmental Solutions plant in Carthage might reopen has Carthage Mayor Jim Woestman skeptical, but hopeful that more jobs might be created without creating the stink that was blamed on the plant in the past.
“We welcome industry, we welcome good industry and the jobs it brings,” Woestman told The Carthage Press on Tuesday. “We hope RES is successful in its endeavors, but we also hope in the long run it will be good for the city.”
Attempts to contact RES about the possibility of reopening have been unsuccessful. The voice mailbox for the plant is full and the listed phone number for Jim Crum, the new manager of the plant who visited with Woestman on Monday, was disconnected.
Woestman described the meeting as a brief introductory meeting, about 15 minutes long.
He said Crum told him that the company was looking for financing to reopen the plant, but it would no longer buy turkey remains and offal from the nearby Butterball plant.
Brian Appel, founder and president of the RES plant’s parent company, Changing World Technologies, told The Kansas City Star in April he hoped to reopen the plant and use corn oil and grease to make the diesel fuel that was produced using turkey remains in the past.
“We talked about the odor,” Woestman said. “He told me the odor would be more like a refinery, but very mild. I told him that we had changed our odor ordinance and made ours stronger than the state’s and he said he was aware of that.”
Woestman said Crum told him that the plant would need workers if it was able to reopen, but it would probably need fewer than the approximately 50 workers that were laid off when Changing World Technologies filed for bankruptcy on March 3.
The $15 million RES plant opened in 2004 as a partnership with Butterball with a process for converting the unusable parts of the turkey, feathers, bones, and other material discarded from the Butterball plant into a form of diesel fuel, which could be burned in furnaces and boilers.
The stench of the turkey remains and other material used at the RES plant caused a three-year long dispute between the city and the company which led to action by the state to fine the company and an order by then-Gov. Matt Blunt to shut it down in December 2005 until the company could figure out how to control the odors.
The company invested millions of dollars in technology to burn and filter the air coming from the plant and to house the trucks transporting the turkey remains in buildings that contained the odor, but complaints persisted.
Appel's bankruptcy petition shows that by Sept. 30, 2008, his related companies had a debt of $117.8 million, some of which was caused by the collapse of the renewable fuels industry.
Woestman said the city will monitor the situation and enforce its rules, but he hopes the company can reopen without causing problems in Carthage.
“There’s nothing else we can do at this time,” Woestman said. “First of all they’ve got to get the financing together and he didn’t give me a timeline. It could be a month or it could be six months from now, we don’t know.”
