Glendale is banking on a decades-old but not widely used technology to make money from other people's trash.

The City Council recently gave the nod for staffers to continue working with Vieste Energy LLC on a waste-to-energy facility at the north end of the Glendale Municipal Landfill.

If the deal moves forward, the plant could open in early 2014.

The company is still negotiating with power suppliers who might be interested in purchasing the energy.

As much as 90,000 tons of trash annually would be diverted from the city landfill and converted to energy to supply 4,500 single-family homes.

The landfill is west of Loop 101 between Northern and Glendale avenues.

The facility would use a process called pyrolytic gasification that converts household garbage and yard debris into synthetic gas that is then used to create steam to power turbines to produce energy.

The process leaves behind an ash byproduct that is either discarded or recycled.

No incineration takes place and no odor would come from the process, company representatives said.

The facility would be built 30 feet below ground level with a projected 80-foot stack.

A "bit of heat vapor" might be seen on a normal day and on a cold day people might see something white, which may be water vapor, according to Mark Branaman, a Vieste co-managing member.

Branaman said the stack's emissions would be continuously monitored with all data available to regulators. He said the stack's emissions "would not affect the air quality in the area."

Branaman said the technology has been in North America for more than 20 years and pointed to waste-to-energy facilities in Harford, Md., and Ontario, Canada, as examples. The 13-acre Harford facility began operation in 1988 and processes about 115,000 tons of waste a year.

Waste-to-energy plant

Vieste Energy LLC would invest $100 million into the 90,000-square-foot facility, which would sort for recyclables.

The project would create 25 new jobs and 75 construction jobs.

It would generate 12 megawatts of power a year.

The facility would be funded with private capital sources, said Mark Branaman of Vieste.

The Chicago-based company proposes to pay Glendale $1 million a year as a host fee for 25 years. The host fee would go up as the tonnage increases. The city projects it could net more than $500,000 a year after paying the company $5 per ton from the fees that landfill users pay to drop off trash.

About 40 percent of the trash going into the landfill each year would be diverted, extending the landfill's life by another 10 to 20 years. The operation could be expanded to divert up to 120,000 tons of refuse from the initially planned 90,000 tons annually.