Michigan Waste Energy Chief Engineer Brad Laesser checks the cameras and emissions data at Detroit's incinerator. (Photo by Sarah Hulett)
Back in the 1980s and 90s,
dozens of communities across
the US built incinerators to
get rid of their trash. Many
of them financed the massive
furnaces with bonds they’re just
now paying off. And now that
those debts are off their books,
some cities are re-thinking whether
burning trash makes environmental
and economic sense. Sarah Hulett reports:
Transcript
Back in the 1980s and 90s,
dozens of communities across
the US built incinerators to
get rid of their trash. Many
of them financed the massive
furnaces with bonds they’re just
now paying off. And now that
those debts are off their books,
some cities are re-thinking whether
burning trash makes environmental
and economic sense. Sarah Hulett reports:
About 300 garbage trucks dump their loads each day at the nation’s biggest
municipal incinerator.
“You see the conveyor house going across, that’s conveying the fuel to the
boilers.”
That’s Brad Laesser. He’s the chief engineer at the Michigan Waste Energy
facility in Detroit.
The “fuel” he’s talking about is shredded-up trash.
And he says that’s the beauty of facilities like this. They produce electricity.
“So right now we’re putting out about 50 megawatts. But we can go to
here.”
Laesser points to 70 on the output gauge. That’s enough electricity to power
about half the homes in Detroit. And the leftover steam is used to heat and
cool more than 200 buildings downtown.
Sounds great, right?
Well, Brad Van Guilder of the Ecology Center says not so much.
“Be wary of people coming and talking to you about large, expensive magic
machines that are going to dispose of your waste for you.”
Van Guilder says municipal waste incinerators are major contributors to
smog, and spew dangerous pollutants like dioxin, lead and mercury.
And he says huge furnaces like Detroit’s make it nearly impossible to get
viable recycling efforts off the ground.
“Think about what’s in the trash that you throw out every day. One of the
most important components is paper and plastic.”
Both can be recycled. But Detroit has not had a curbside recycling program
for the past 20 years. That’s because the contract with the incinerator
required that all trash picked up at the curb be used to keep the furnaces
burning.
That changed this summer, though – when the contract expired. Now about
30,000 households are part of a curbside recycling pilot project. And there
are drop-off sites where people can take their recyclables.
(sound of recycling center)
Matthew Naimi heads an organization that runs several drop-off sites, and –
maybe surprisingly – he’s okay with the incinerator. Naimi says he sees
trash disposal and recycling as two separate industries.
“I realized that if we shut the incinerator down before we got a good
established recycling program running, we’d be burying our recyclables
instead of burning them.”
And officials with Covanta – which runs the Detroit incinerator – agree that
recycling and incineration can work together.
Paul Gilman is the chief sustainability officer for Covanta. He says landfills
are the problem – not recycling.
“Landfills and energy-from-waste facilities, that’s where the competition is.
It isn’t at the upper step of recycling.”
He says cheap landfill space makes the economics of incineration difficult.
But he’s hoping that could change with the passage of a climate change bill
in Washington. Gilman says in Europe and Asia, trash incinerators like
Detroit’s don’t get treated the same way as power plants fueled with coal or
natural gas.
“So in Asia, under the Kyoto protocols, a facility like this actually generates
what are called greenhouse gas credits. They’re reducing greenhouse gasses
by the act of processing solid waste and keeping it from going to a landfill.”
Where trash produces methane – a potent greenhouse gas.
But the people who want the incinerator shut down say they don’t believe
burning trash is the greener way to go. They want the city to landfill its
waste while it builds an aggressive recycling program.
So far, they’re not getting what they want from city leaders.
The board that oversees how Detroit handles its trash recently voted to go
with incineration for at least the next year.
For The Environment Report, I’m Sarah Hulett.