Advanced Circular Manufacturing turns everything your household puts out into manufactured products — and pays Johnson County back every month for 30 years.
Every benefit below is a direct result of what Advanced Circular Manufacturing does differently — for your home, your neighbourhood, and your county.
Every figure below is derived from the county-level projections and scaled to a Johnson County household.
Household benefit estimate based on ~$8.3M annual county net surplus ÷ 250,000 households. Environmental and performance figures are designed targets. All projections subject to feasibility confirmation.
All environmental figures are designed performance targets at commercial scale. Confirmed values require site-specific feasibility study.
Here's where everything flows — from your collection bin to the monthly payment arriving at the county.
This is not a discount. It is not a rebate. It is a contractual royalty derived from the value of what your materials become. Johnson County receives a monthly payment based on what it paid the previous month in manufacturing service fees — with the payment designed to exceed what was paid, from the second year of operations onward.
The Circular Royalty starts 13 months after collections begin. From that point, every manufacturing service fee the county pays generates a corresponding royalty payment 13 months later. It's a rolling, compounding return — not a one-time event.
Here's where your materials go today, what closes, and where the new factory would be built.
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Yes. One bin. Everything in it. Food scraps, packaging, clothing, garden clippings, electronics, batteries, glass, metal, plastic, paper — all of it goes in the same collection bin.
Sorting happens inside the facility, not in your home. The manufacturing system processes the full mixed stream. There are no categories. There are no contamination rules. You don't need to rinse containers, remove lids, or check lists. One bin, collected on your regular collection day.
The only materials that continue to use a separate pathway are household hazardous materials like paint thinners and solvents — and Johnson County already has an HHW facility for those.
Your neighbourhood will smell better. Not worse.
The current odour issue in Shawnee comes from the WM landfill — methane flaring, open-air decomposition, and blasting operations for the new waste cell have all generated complaints serious enough that the City of Shawnee granted only a 1-year operating permit in November 2024. When the landfill closes and Advanced Circular Manufacturing replaces it, that source is gone.
The manufacturing facility is enclosed, like an indoor factory. It is designed for near-zero atmospheric discharge — meaning almost no smell or discharge to the surrounding area. Think of it like a clean industrial plant, not a landfill.
Two ways — direct and indirect.
Direct: The Circular Royalty payments flowing back to Johnson County from the second year of operations onward create a growing surplus in the county's budget. That surplus gives the county more financial flexibility over time — meaning municipal service costs are less likely to rise, and in some cases may fall. At full operation, the net annual surplus to the county exceeds $40 million per year.
Indirect: With one collection bin and no sorting overhead, the cost and complexity of the current collection system decreases. Fewer vehicle trips, fewer separate service contracts, and reduced contamination management all lower the operational cost of your collection service.
These are medium-term changes — they compound over the 30-year contract term, not overnight. But they are real and they go in one direction.
They all go in the same bin. No separate drop-off required.
Electronics, batteries, old phones, small appliances, and similar items are all processable by the Advanced Circular Manufacturing system. The manufacturing process handles the full range of materials that households generate.
You don't need to drive to a special facility. You don't need to hold items waiting for a collection event. You don't need to check whether something is accepted. If your household put it out, the system handles it.
The Johnson County HHW facility remains available for paint, solvents, and genuinely hazardous materials — but those are the exception, not the rule.
No. This is not incineration. The difference matters and it's easy to understand.
Incineration burns materials with oxygen, at high temperatures. The materials are destroyed — turned into ash and carbon dioxide. Air emissions are a structural feature of how it works. The result is thermal energy and ash, plus CO₂ released to the atmosphere.
Advanced Circular Manufacturing uses a microwave-based process in an oxygen-free chamber — no flame, no burning, no oxygen. The materials are not destroyed. They are broken apart at the molecular level and reformed into manufactured products: graphite (used in batteries), hydrogen (clean fuel), and ultrapure water. The process is closer to a chemical factory than a furnace.
Think of it this way: incineration destroys your materials. Advanced Circular Manufacturing manufactures with them. What comes out isn't ash and CO₂ — it's graphite for an electric vehicle battery, hydrogen for a fuel cell, or clean water for industrial use.
This distinction also explains why PFAS compounds — which survive incineration and leach from landfills — are permanently destroyed by the Advanced Circular Manufacturing process. The molecular-level conversion breaks chemical bonds that thermal processes leave intact.