Resource Sharing: Bay Area business park going green-Project considered on cutting edge of industrial development

A DEVELOPER is building an eco-industrial park in San Leandro in what may be a major step toward the greening of industrial America.

By Janis Mara – BUSINESS WRITER Oakland Tribune

McMahon Development Group is hard at work on the 21-acre park in San Leandro on Davis Street at the former Hohener meat-packing site. The developers worked with the city of San Leandro and the Alameda County Waste Management Authority to create the park.

While there are many parks in the country that evolved eco-industrial elements naturally over time, it is unusual for such a project to be consciously conceived and developed as a unit. Right now, it’s estimated that only about five to seven such parks exist in the United States.

"The Bay Area is definitely a frontrunner in this," said Bill Shireman, president of Future 500 and chief executive officer of the Global Futures Foundation.

An eco-industrial park is a community of manufacturing and service businesses that share resources and cooperate on joint services such as energy generation. Often, they use each others’ waste streams as raw material input. They also use each others’ ideas and facilities as resources in a way that improves efficiency.

"Long-term, this is definitely a trend. It’s a natural next step in industrial development," said Shireman.

The idea originated in Colenburk, Denmark, with a park that evolved over a period of 25 years, Shireman said.

"A couple of companies found it was easier and cheaper for them to use each others’ wastes as raw materials than to spend millions of dollars on pollution equipment. Also, the people in the community didn’t want their air and water contaminated by emissions. So they figured out how to use the waste from one plant as the raw material for another," Shireman said.

Shireman predicts that the trend will continue to grow in the country. "In the Bay Area in 20 years, eco-industrial partnerships will be common."

At the Bayside Business Park, FedEx Ground has signed up as a tenant. And Regale Packaging and Southern States Power Co., as well as other companies, have expressed an interest.

"Regale takes used paper such as newspaper and corrugated paper and breaks it down into a slurry, a soup, and then forms it into different packaging materials under high pressure," said Russell Pierce, executive vice president of McMahon Development Group, the developer of the project. "One example of the end products is the molded tan-colored packaging material you get at the ball park to carry your soft drinks.

"That’s the type of use that is desirable for this eco-park theme. Instead of the newspapers going into the landfill, or transported across the world to China to be made into new products, they get re-manufactured and go back out into the market," said Pierce.

Though plans have not been finalized, a third party power plant is looking to supply Regale and the other tenants with power. The third party provider also generates heat and that could be used to create steam, which is also used in the Regale process.

"And that could be used to heat the water at the wastewater treatment plant and make it into steam," Pierce said.

Because the park is located right next to the waste management transfer station, the materials Regale needs for their process can come from next door instead of having to be trucked to the company.

Pierce said his company initially wanted to create an industrial park because San Leandro has too little light manufacturing space and the park would fill a need.

The idea for an eco-industrial park came initially from the Bay Area’s Economic Development Alliance for Business, which brought in the city of San Leandro and Alameda County Waste Management Authority. The latter offered financial incentives to McMahon Development Group in exchange for going green.

Work on the park is moving ahead, with the FedEx facility due to be completed in July. But Rory Bakke, senior program manager for the Waste Management Authority and a moving force in the creation of the eco-industrial park, is not resting on her laurels. There’s much work to be done yet to make the project a success, she said.

"We’re in the throes of making it work right now. The next three to six months are crucial. We’re still recruiting tenants and don’t have the deals made yet. It’s kind of like a Scrabble game when you haven’t finished the words yet."

Bakke said, "It’s an ongoing challenge and an exciting process."

Janis Mara can be reached at (510) 293-2465 or [email protected] .

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