In the global race to develop alternative energy technology, a fuel source with a name like “Fluff” might seem to have some strikes against it from the start. Nonetheless, Fluff has won the backing of R&D giant Battelle.

McMinnville-based WastAway Services, which three years ago pioneered a thermal system that creates the wood-pulp-like Fluff from household garbage, already markets it as a soil substrate; parent company BouldinCorp, a top producer of horticultural machinery, had long cultivated the market that so far accounts for 80% of Fluff’s sales. WastAway turns the other 20% into a durable, extruded composite, which is sold locally for use in landscaping and is being tested as a building material.

Until recently, the company’s sales focus had been less product than process: City trash trucks can bypass the landfill and dump unsorted solid waste into a mechanical system that in 30 minutes shreds and heats it, removes heavy metals and produces odorless, sterile Fluff. In June, green-loving musical festival Bonnaroo recycled its garbage at WastAway, and since 2003 Warren County has won more than $200,000 in recycling grants for trucking its trash to BouldenCorp’s nearby WastAway facility.

But Warren County didn’t build that facility, and company CEO Floyd Bouldin admits getting municipalities to invest in a $5 million system to save landfill space has been a hard sell. He lost a potential contract in Coffee County, he says, when waste service giant BFI underbid his $40-per-ton tipping fee.

“We’re going to have to go where tipping fees are high and not try to compete with landfilling but with recycling,” he says. While Bouldin won’t discuss WastAway’s revenues, he says the system represents a $20 million investment, and he’s been looking to broaden his market.

He might have found it with partner Battelle, which is helping develop a market for both process and product. The Columbus, Ohio-based nonprofit, which has advanced ubiquitous technologies like the compact disc, has for decades studied biomass “gasification”—or partial combustion—to create clean energy. Testing is ongoing, but Battelle director Satya P. Chauhan expects Fluff to behave like other biomasses while offering universal availability. Unlike, say, agricultural byproducts, Fluff is as near as the county landfill—if the system’s there to produce it.

If altruism won’t drive interest in WastAway, the collaborators believe the carrot and stick of capitalism and environmental legislation will. This month, they’ll begin marketing a $12 million system to municipalities who want to turn trash to cash by gasifying Fluff and selling the green energy to local industries—for whom, Chauhan warns, “ecological incentive is likely to translate into economics in the near future.”