The economic gloom-and-doom continued yesterday when Daimler AG announced that it will discontinue its Sterling Trucks line next March. Daimler will close two plants that produce Sterling trucks — one in Portland, Ore., and one in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada — resulting in the loss of approximately 3,500 jobs, according to media reports.

“This is an indication of how bad things are,” Michael Tyndall, an analyst at Nomura Securities in London told Bloomberg News. “It’s positive for the long term, but everyone’s focused on the short term.”

Daimler’s press release announcing the move can be read by clicking here.

And here are a handful of news stories on the move:

• The aforementioned Bloomberg article.

• An article by Forbes.com.

• One from The New York Times.

• And, finally, the Wall Street Journal’s take.

Several years ago, former Vice-President Al Gore appeared on Saturday Night Live and, in a skit based on the premise that he won the 2000 election and was addressing the nation from the Oval Office, said that he had mandated that cars run on trash. The joke got a big laugh from the studio audience, surely in part because the idea seemed a little wacky.

Well, wacky may be getting closer to reality than we could have imagined then.

According to this report from a Northwestern Medill School of Journalism newspaper, Lake County, Ind., may soon be home to the “first commercial-scale plants in the country [that] turn garbage into ethanol.”

Indiana Ethanol Power LLC has submitted a proposal to the county’s Solid Waste Management District for a facility that would use a process called “weak-acid hydrolysis” to convert trash into roughly 20 million gallons of ethanol a year, the paper says. Meanwhile, Genahol-Powers 1 LLC is seeking the county’s permission to build a facility that would burn trash to produce approximately 30 million gallons of ethanol annually.

If the district approves the proposals at a June meeting, then the plants could conceivably be up and running within two years, according to the paper. However, the local Sierra Club is voicing concerns about the technology that would be used in the Genahol plant.

“It’s still kind of an old-fashioned technology,” Sandy O’Brien, chair of the Dunelands Sierra Club, told the newspaper. “They’ll be burning things they could be recycling, like plastic.”

The Lake County news comes nearly a month after Waste Management announced that it has partnered with Linde North America to develop a Northern California facility that will convert landfill gas into liquified natural gas (LNG) to fuel area collection trucks. The facility is slated to open next year and Waste Management says it will produce roughly 13,000 gallons of LNG a day.

So, what’s your take? Will this prove to be a viable end use for trash?

Filling up the gas tank for the Memorial Day weekend getaway serves as a powerful (and painful) reminder of how much commodity prices have soared in recent months. The Waste Equipment Equipment Technology Association (WASTEC) has produced a three-page “issue bulletin” that summarizes the trends and looks at the effects on both manufacturers and haulers. To download a copy of the bulletin, visit www.wastec.org and click on the “WASTEC Issues Bulletin on Materials Cost Increases” link on the right-hand side of the page.

And from all of us here at Waste Age, have a happy and safe Memorial Day weekend.