The city of Sacramento bungled badly when it struck an exclusive arrangement with U.S. Science and Technology to negotiate a deal on a waste-to-energy project. The city should stop wasting staff time and city resources trying to resurrect this flawed proposal and start the process anew.

Sacramento needs to find a better way to dispose of its garbage. Currently on most nights, some two dozen diesel-powered garbage trucks haul Sacramento municipal waste over the Sierra to the Lockwood landfill in the deserts of western Nevada, a 282-mile round trip. The nightly caravan pollutes the air, is expensive and is ultimately unsustainable.

Given that, the city is right to seek alternative disposal options. The technology Sacramento officials chose to explore exclusively, plasma arc gasification, is promising but unproven. It has no track record in this country. In fact, there are no plasma arc gasification plants of the specific type proposed for Sacramento operating anywhere in the world.

The Japanese facility that city officials visited earlier this year does not burn municipal waste exclusively in its plant, nor does it market the slag byproducts of the gasification process, key features of the proposed Sacramento facility.

The unproven technology is not the only problem with the Sacramento's waste-to-energy proposal.

USST, the company Sacramento selected to partner with in this venture, has no track record of accomplishment. Formed in 2006, the company includes a shifting cast of executives and partners, none of whom has a history of either developing or operating a plant of the type proposed for Sacramento.

The man who initially approached city officials with the waste-to-energy idea, William Ludwig, used to head the now-defunct Rice Growers Association. The association dissolved in 2000, leaving $11 million in debt and a trail of lawsuits. Since then, as The Bee reported Monday, Ludwig has formed six unsuccessful start-up companies.

Partners with Ludwig in the proposed city waste deal include people who have pitched other big ideas to Sacramento officials, including an international trade center and a development plan for the downtown railyards. None of these schemes ever got off the ground. That alone should have raised alarm bells at City Hall. For some reason, it didn't.

Last February, the City Council adopted a resolution granting USST what city officials describe as "a 90-day exclusive right to negotiate principles of agreement for development of a 'waste-to-energy' project." That agreement was extended in May, then again in August.

City officials insist that they have made no firm commitments. Everything is tentative, they say, while nothing of value has been exchanged and the city is risking nothing.

Unfortunately, valuable time has been wasted. While city officials focus on the highly speculative plasma arc gasification scheme, they are ignoring other, more realistic options proposed by firms with credentials far more solid that USST's.

Finally, there's this: Even if a good waste-to-energy project were proposed, it would take a minimum of five years to get it permitted and built. Sacramento needs to find an alternative to hauling its garbage to Nevada well before then. That's where city officials need to concentrate their efforts.