GRRO News

GRRO has Brought Influx of Ames Researchers

Eldora/New Providence, Iowa – February 24, 2006

By Rick Patri Herald-Index Staff Writer

The arrival of Global Resource Recovery Organization’s research design and marketing wings in Eldora during the last several months has meant the introduction of a number of new faces to the local scene.

Bill Flowers, who came to work for Loran Balvanz with all the changes, is one of the key figures.  Flowers and a number of people with backgrounds in engineering design and skilled in bringing the fruits of the lab to the marketplace have been taking over offices in the GRRO site in the Eldora industrial park over the last year.  <>They have in common the fact they were once part of an Ames-based Iowa State University associated private consortium that has been working on new technologies out even beyond the edge.

Flowers says that Edge Technologies was once home to himself, Duane Canny, and Craig Mushel, all now with GRRO.  <>Edge Technologies in Ames, he says, is like a great deal of cutting edge innovation-tied to the United States Government, and the Department of Defense in terms of a great deal of its research.  In fact, he and some of the others came to Edge a few years ago when the research center was looking at expanding into the civilian commercial markets with products.  Second thoughts on that and certain impatience with the speed at which those inroads could be made, caused the Ames firm to re-examine its emphasis, and Flowers says that his interest in commercial rather than military applications led him to check with Balvanz about the work at GRRO.  <>Flowers says his specialty in the engineering field actually lies in marketing, bringing products to the commercial level.  He came to GRRO from the Ames-based center and after a number of years working for Fisher Controls in Marshalltown, and says he is in the process of moving to this area once he sells that Marshalltown home.  <>GRRO had been associated with the Ames-based research group and holding company at one time.  It initially looked at some of the breakthroughs made in the Ames center in the quest to put ultra sound applications to work reducing odor in hog manure.  The research involved breaking cell walls in manure so that microbes could more quickly interact and make for a chemical product that was less odor-offensive.  Global Resource Recovery subsequently in developing its low heat drying technologies that have been proved useful in recycling a wide variety of materials.  Tests have been done on pulp and paper, municipal waste, drying distillers grains by-products, done on animal manures of all kinds, contaminated soils brewer’s grains, dredge residue and industrial sludge, coal fines, sand, and a host of other materials.  In most of the cases the end-product is a waste-transformed and given a second useful life. 

One of the keys focus of GRRO’s own efforts has long been on hog wastes, however, Flowers says the project in Eldora-New Providence has drawn a number of people from the Ames center.  Duane Canny lives in Roland and Craig Mushel just south of that community.  Flowers will be coming too Eldora with wife Sherry, son Cody, and daughter Janie.  Balvanz says he believes that technologies like the Tempest System can only be in greater and greater demand in the next few years.  He says that all indications are that livestock raising will inevitably become more and more subject to environmental regulation, just like any other large industry.  He told some of his visitors last week that one of the new challenges is to take the basic technologies and bring them down to a physical scale where they can be introduced on the farm easily and cost effectively.  The system developed over the last three years is plenty accessible even now.  A Tempest drying unit, essentially contained in a semi-tractor trailer combination, went out on the road and did the testing mentioned earlier. 

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