Facilities that employ this process burn garbage to generate heat, which boils water and creates steam. The steam in turn spins a turbine that produces electricity, and that electricity is then sold to the region's electrical grid.
The issue of whether to dispose of garbage in a landfill or to incinerate trash is one municipalities large and small struggle with constantly, and although environmental experts across the board preach conservation and recycling efforts first and foremost, not everything is recyclable and there are some things that simply cannot be conserved forever.
Trash, much like death and taxes, seems to have become an inescapable part of our modern society.
And when it finally comes time to find some place to put all that trash, environmentalists almost uniformly fall on the side of placing it into a blast furnace, because rather than sit in the ground and pollute the soil and air through contamination and excess methane production, the biomass of garbage can be harnessed or "recaptured" to generate energy.
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Esty, of Cheshire, co-authored the book "Green to Gold" and was an adviser to President Obama on environmental policy.
Since amendments to the Clean Air Act in the early 1990s clamped down on trash-burning facilities, their numbers have drastically shrunk across the nation, from more than 1,100 in 1990 to fewer than 90 today. Connecticut is host to six, including the one in Wallingford at 530 S. Cherry St., which can burn 420 tons of trash per day.
The high number of trash-burning plants in Connecticut can be attributed to a conscious commitment the state made several decades ago to limit landfill development and find more environmentally friendly ways of disposing of its waste, according to Paul Nonnenmacher, director of public affairs for the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority, the state's largest trash disposal entity and owner of the Wallingford facility.
"In the 1960s and 1970s, when the country became more environmentally aware, people realized that the town dumps they were burying stuff in were just holes in the ground that seeped into the ground water," Nonnenmacher said.
When a 171-acre landfill in Windsor closes in 2012, Nonnenmacher noted, Connecticut will be the first state in the nation without an active municipal solid waste landfill.
Ownership of the Wallingford waste-from-energy facility, built in 1989, is scheduled as of July 1, 2010, to revert to Covanta Energy, a New Jersey-based multinational corporation that has served as the facility's operator since the early 1990s.
At that point, Covanta officials say, the facility will fall under the aegis of the company's Clean World Initiative, a new program dedicated to improving the company's environmental performance and lowering its carbon footprint.
Our intention is "to make energy-from-waste and the electricity it produces the cleanest, most reliable source of electricity in the world," said Paul Gilman, Covanta's chief sustainability officer.
Although emission devices on waste-to-energy facilities result in their combustion processes producing less environmentally harmful carbon dioxide emissions than facilities that burn coal or oil to achieve the same result, public perception of this generation process still faces an uphill battle, Gilman acknowledges, as well as competition in some areas of the country where land is cheap and plentiful.
"After you've recycled, what do you do: landfills or energy-from-waste? Landfills are still pretty cheap," Gilman said. "It's still tough to compete. There are facilities that are closing down and there are communities that are strapped for cash and say 'The landfill's cheaper. Let's go with the landfill.'"
Sixty-four percent of the refuse in the United States is placed in landfills, 29 percent is recycled, while only about 7 percent is used to generate energy, compared to some European countries where recycling and waste-from-energy production hover around the 40-50 percent.
Through its Clean World Initiative, and once it assumes control of the Wallingford facility, Covanta is hoping to change the average American's perception of the benefits of burning garbage to create energy, and in the process do its share to usher in a cleaner, "greener" world.
"People in the U.S. usually say 'Oh, we don't like energy-from-waste. It hurts recycling.' No, it doesn't. If a community, or a state, or the country were to decide we want to go the more sustainable route, like Europe, we'd increase the amount of our recycling; what we can't recycle, we send to an energy-from-waste facility to recover the energy; and then we'd go to landfills as a last resort," Gilman said. "How do we overcome the skepticism that a lot of Americans have? Well, let's get out and tell our story, let's share it with people, let's be very open about what we do, and let's make sure we're always getting better at what we do. That's the thinking behind it."
Covanta was cited for exceeding its permitted dioxin/furan emissions limits at the plant in 2007 and faces a pending fine from the state Departmental of Environmental Protection, but during a recent tour officials pointed to a series of three newly installed carbon filters retrofitted to the facility to mitigate future dioxin emissions.
The plant is only required to have one such filter, according to Tim Cady, its facility manager, but installed the additional two "because it was the right thing to do."
dmoran@record-journal.com
(203) 317-2224
