ARLINGTON — It’s been a quarter century since Jeff Surma first envisioned building “the ultimate recycling machine,” which would transform garbage and hazardous wastes into renewable fuels.

That vision became reality this month when the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality approved operating licenses for the first commercial gasification plant of its type to be licensed in the United States.

“The permit allows us now to start the plant,” Surma said Oct. 7.

He is a founder, former president and CEO of Bend-based InEnTec, which designed and manufactured the technology at the heart of the Columbia Ridge gasification plant near Arlington. The plant was previously operated in September for DEQ and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency testing, he said.

Ultimately, Surma said, the technology has the potential to produce more than 12.5 million gallons of ethanol per year from municipal landfills nationwide, and that amount increases fivefold with the addition of all the industrial, medical and hazardous wastes.

That technology earned InEnTec The Wall Street Journal’s 2010 Technology Innovation Award in Energy. It received a financial endorsement Wednesday when Waste Management, one of the nation’s largest trash disposal companies, invested the company, and a California company plans to incorporate InEnTec technology into a $180 million plant that will turn trash into ethanol.

“Bend is the headquarters for all of this because that is where InEnTec is headquartered,” Surma said.

Between its Bend office and its research center in Richland, Wash., the company employs fewer than 100 people, but Karl Schoene, InEnTec president and CEO, said he expects that number to rise as demand grows for the firm’s technology.

For Surma, 52, the quest began at Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Richland, Wash. He was the chief chemical engineer on a team of scientists that invented the first plasma enhanced burner in 1985. It was developed to convert nuclear waste into a vitrified glass material for safer long-term storage.

That work led Surma to team to form InEnTec in 1995 with Dan Cohn, director of the Plasma Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who also worked on the nuclear waste project, and Charlie Titus, a longtime electrical engineer with General Electric.

InEnTec took the nuclear waste vitrification technology and applied it to medical, industrial and municipal wastes. Instead of a glasslike material, however, Surma and the InEnTec scientists developed a way to turn it into synthetic gas (syngas), which can be converted into liquid fuel, such as ethanol, in a second step.

A fourth partner, Larry Dinkin, a founder of Marie Calendar frozen foods, sold his food business to Con Agra and invested the seed capital that helped launch InEnTec.

“From the very beginning in 1985, we saw the potential for this technology to be used to convert all kinds of wastes, anything with organic matter, into fuel and other useful products,” Surma said.

The company received its first patents in 1995 and 1997 for transforming medical wastes and hazardous wastes into gas with glass and metal by-products clean enough to recycle. Its first small-scale plants included one built in Japan in 2003 for transforming PCBs, and another in Taiwan for transforming medical wastes and batteries, Surma said.

In 2009, InEnTec entered into a joint venture called S4 Energy Solutions with Houston-based Waste Management to build the plant near Arlington.

Surma became president and CEO of S4 Energy Solutions so he could oversee plant construction, which began in January 2010. He turned his duties as president and CEO of InEnTec over to Karl Schoene.

Converting trash into energy is not a new idea.

Older waste-to-energy systems either burn garbage to run steam-powered electrical generators, or compost it to produce methane gas, which is burned to generate electricity. But Surma said those older technologies came under fire from environmental groups because the processes spewed ash and other airborne pollutants into the atmosphere.

At the Columbia Ridge gasification plant, InEnTec’s Plasma Enhanced Melter superheats garbage at temperatures ranging from 10,000-20,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which Surma said is so hot it sterilizes and breaks down waste to the molecular level.

“Hydrogen and carbon monoxide are the building blocks for clean fuels like ethanol and methanol,” Surma said. “There are no hazardous ash or metals in emissions from our plant.”

He said the metal particles are removed and are clean enough to recycle, and the ash is removed and melted into a glass material that can be used as aggregate for road paving projects and other uses.

The final product: clean-burning syngas that burns like methane. But, Schoene said, it also can be economically transformed into ethanol, methanol, hydrogen and other fuels suitable for use in cars, trucks, trains, tractors and other equipment that now run primarily on fossil fuels.

“It has the potential to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Schoene said.

The DEQ has said emissions from the plant will not exceed its permit limits or violate federal air quality standards.

By the end of this year or early spring, Schoene and Surma said InEnTec and S4 Energy Solutions plan to break ground on Phase II of the Columbia Ridge gasification plant, which will convert the syngas produced by the newly licensed Phase I plant into ethanol or other clean-burning fuels.

“Now all of the many years of work is coming to fruition,” Surma said.

The efforts have already started to spread. Last month, a landfill operator announced plans to build a much larger gasification plant near Reno, Nev., utilizing InEnTec’s technology.

In a document filed Sept. 22 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Fulcrum BioEnergy, of Pleasanton, Calif., proposed a $180 million plant on 17 acres in Storey County, Nev. According to the filing, InEnTec’s technology for converting trash to synthetic gas (syngas) will be combined with Fulcrum’s technology for converting syngas to ethanol.

The filing says the Nevada plant will convert about 3,700 tons of trash per week from two landfills into 259,000 gallons of ethanol.

Surma said InEnTec’s technology is more environmentally friendly than older waste-burning systems. The byproducts, such as ash and metals, are extracted, melted down and sterilized to produce clean, recyclable metal and glass materials.

“I like to think it is the ultimate form of recycling,” he said. “We take almost any kind of material and break it down into its elements and reform those into an engineered product.”

“It took a lot longer than I ever imagined to get to this point of putting plants on the ground that are doing what we conceived more than 25 years ago, that is, transforming waste into useful products.”