Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (27 page)

The push to build such plants, along with a heightened commitment to bicycle-friendly policies and an advanced public transit system, began with the oil crisis of the 1970s, when Arab oil-producing nations embargoed countries that supported Israel. Gas lines, rationing, economic upheaval and inflation resulted. Like many nations at the time, Denmark launched initiatives to develop renewable power and energy independence so it could never again be blackmailed or coaxed to take sides by foreign oil suppliers. When the political situation changed and the oil started flowing freely again, most countries, none more than the U.S., quickly abandoned government stimulus for renewable energy and aggressive mandates for conservation and auto fuel efficiency. But a few countries, Japan and Denmark chief among them, decided it would serve multiple purposes—national security, economic stability and environmental protection—to stay the course on key elements of those programs. The climate, the global economy and the politics of energy would be in a very different and certainly less dire place today if Denmark’s approach had been the majority view rather than the minority’s.

Since that time, twenty-nine waste-to-energy plants were constructed in Denmark; as of 2011, ten more were in the works, planned or already under construction. The subterranean heating systems required a massive public works undertaking, with extensive and disruptive excavations that took years. But when it was done and the hot air started blowing, home heating bills in the cold Scandinavian climate dropped to a fifth of what they had been. Rebates and tax incentives accompanied a government mandate for developers, homeowners and businesses to thoroughly insulate buildings to avoid wasting this new heating energy; a similar set of incentives led to the mass purchases of energy-efficient appliances, with adoption rates reaching 90 percent.

At the time of the seventies oil crisis, Denmark depended on foreign fossil fuel supplies for 90 percent of its energy. Now it is energy independent and a net oil exporter from its modest offshore drilling operations.

One of the largest wind power installations in the world was constructed on the coast, and Denmark became a world leader in wind energy with the rise of its homegrown company Vestas, maker of state-of-the-art wind turbines. The industry was jump-started in the seventies with major investments of research dollars, loan guarantees and subsidies from the government; now little Denmark owns a third of the multibillion-dollar global wind turbine business. This is a business America initially dominated before the post-oil-crisis renewable energy incentives were killed.

Nineteen percent of Denmark’s power is generated by wind, the highest in the world. An even greater amount of the country’s energy supply is derived from trash.

In a country where electricity is generated by nonprofit electrical cooperatives in which the ratepayers are also the plant owners, attitudes about utilities and energy are very different from those in America. In Denmark, polls consistently show that a majority of Danes are willing to pay a higher rate if the electricity is clean and produced with domestic fuels.

The waste-to-energy system as it exists in Denmark today uses a tried-and-true technology called “mass burn,” which aptly describes how the facility operates. Trash trucks deliver garbage to the plants, with recyclables already separated out. The garbage is then pushed into furnaces by a series of moving grates. The burning trash heats boilers to create high-pressure steam. A flue gas cleaning system and banks of filters remove pollutants so thoroughly that the very tall smokestacks that used to be the main feature of such plants—so pollution would be dispersed far above neighborhoods—are no longer necessary. The output of the most harmful byproducts of incineration, including the main environmental showstopper in the U.S., dioxins, has been reduced to levels that represent a mere fraction of what the average home fireplace or backyard barbecue puts out. These plants are now so clean that they exceed European pollution standards (generally stricter than in the U.S.) by a factor of ten, and the trash-based power is considered a form of renewable energy. The plants not only emit less greenhouse gases than coal plants, they are also superior to landfills in that respect, where even the most advanced methane capture systems (such as Puente Hills’s landfill gas power station) still allow 50 percent of the climate-busting methane to bleed into the atmosphere. Methane has twenty-three times the global-warming punch as the carbon dioxide produced by combustion. The Denmark waste-to-energy plants scour and sift the solid residue of the incineration process, called “slag,” removing metals for recycling as well as other useful chemical byproducts. What’s left is sold to construction companies to use for concrete and road building. Nothing is wasted.

Denmark and other countries in Europe, where there are more than four hundred waste-to-energy plants in service, have made many of the structures architecturally attractive, incorporating art, sculpture and novel design. Some are community centers, some anchor parks. The Spittelau plant in Vienna, with its brightly colored design and illuminated globe perched atop a tower, has become a tourist destination. A garbage power plant was built in Paris that burns 1,260 tons of trash a day less than three miles from the Eiffel Tower; surrounded by trees and topped with a grassy, living roof, it is all but invisible. A new state-of-the-art plant is now under construction in Copenhagen to replace the original aged Amagerforbrænding plant by 2016. The new facility will double as a community ski park, the tall incinerator building serving as the anchor for three separate slopes of varying difficulty while, beneath the snow, the trash from five municipalities will be burned to make power and heat for 140,000 homes. The Danish architect Bjarke Ingels has designed the facility with a chimney that will blow smoke rings each time it accumulates a quarter ton of carbon dioxide from the burning trash. The idea is to be playful while also reminding people that their consumption has consequences, that trash power still exacts a price on the environment, and that the best strategy for dealing with waste is to waste less.

“They are so far ahead of us,” Themelis says. “Our behavior in the U.S. in this area is really quite irrational. And it’s irresponsible. We are throwing energy and money away every day, burying it in the ground.”

Themelis has been researching and advocating trash energy for decades now, building an international network of experts and engineers by founding the Waste-to-Energy Research and Technology Council, with branches in the U.S., Greece, Germany, Japan, India, Brazil, Mexico and China, where the government has been on a waste-to-energy building spree since the turn of the century. A native of Athens, Greece, Themelis directs the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. A chemical engineer by training, his initial work was in the private sector, where he developed a more efficient method of copper smelting that drastically reduced sulfur emissions in the mining industry. When he came to Columbia University in 1980, he arrived at what was then called the Henry Krumb School of Mines, where he says the historical emphasis was the “three Ms”—mining, materials and metallurgy.

Eventually Themelis helped lead a group of faculty members who shifted the emphasis to the “three Es”—earth, environment and engineering—which led to renaming the school the Earth Engineering Center. Waste-energy research has dominated his career ever since. He says the current system of burying waste in landfills amounts to burying a billion barrels of oil a year that could be used for much needed energy.

Themelis frets that the same arguments against waste-to-energy used in the eighties are still being used to keep the technology limited in the United States, which has eighty-seven waste-to-energy plants, almost all of them dating back to the early 1990s or before. Even though the emissions controls have advanced and more than satisfied tough European environmental standards, fear over dioxins and other pollution remains great and these are often still cited by opponents. Yet a 2009 study concluded that harmful emissions from landfills were greater that those from modern waste-to-energy plants.
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“There’s just a great deal of fear about it,” says Themelis. “It’s like some isolated tribe who has never seen an airplane before, and is frightened of it. They just close their eyes to it.”

Aside from concerns over emissions, which proponents (as well as European environmental agencies) assert have been solved by new technology, a principal argument against ramping up waste-to-energy in the U.S. lies in its poor energy and economic bottom line when compared to recycling. The plants really are expensive—with large-scale facilities costing in the $600 million range and up—and trash is not a very good fuel, so the power output per dollar spent on boilers and generators is less than in a conventional power plant. Recycling trash, on the other hand, has a lower environmental impact and, pound for pound, can save more energy than burning the same trash produces. Recycling aluminum cans, for instance, saves a whopping 96 percent of the energy needed to produce aluminum from bauxite ore. Recycling glass jars and bottles saves 21 percent of the energy needed to make new glass, recycling newsprint saves 45 percent, and recycling plastic beverage bottles saves 76 percent (other plastic types differ in the percentages, but the energy savings are there, too). More recycling, then, is a better strategy than waste-to-energy, Themelis’s detractors say. Critics of the technology also fear that adding trash-burning plants to the mix will discourage recycling because expensive plants will demand more trash in order to pay off their hefty costs.

Themelis says that recycling’s energy advantage is real and that it often is the better alternative, but not always. There is a flaw in the recycling case: After a certain point, the energy gains are more theoretical than practical for many types of trash. Those theoretical energy savings are often not realized because recycling some materials still costs more than using new raw materials. Recycling plastic grocery bags, for example, costs four to five times what the raw materials are worth. Transportation costs, manpower for sorting recyclables from garbage and contamination problems make recycling a lot of common items of trash too costly or too difficult or both, despite the energy savings. This is why recycling rates, outside of a few highly committed U.S. cities, are far lower than the amount of recyclable material in the American waste stream. And it’s why even America’s recycling leader, San Francisco, still sends trash to the landfill in which two-thirds of the material is theoretically recyclable. This is why the king of trash says he’s got ten billion dollars in value locked up in the trash he hauls to the landfill, if only he could tap into it. He would if he could. But that capability has eluded us.

Themelis argues that material, then, should be used to make energy, not garbage mountains. This would not hurt recycling, he suggests, but would augment it.

Furthermore, Themelis says, no recycling process is 100 percent. There is always 10 to 15 percent residue left behind that can’t be recycled. No one ever counts that or subtracts it from the total amount recycled in those cities with such high recycling numbers, Themelis points out. All that material is counted as “diverted,” then the leftover muck just gets quietly carted to the landfill. But that residue also would be perfect fuel for a waste-to-energy plant.

The final argument against waste-to-energy—that it will reverse gains in recycling—is belied by the history of the technology, Themelis points out. The cities and nations that have made trash burning a key part of their energy and waste strategies—Denmark, Germany, Austria, Japan, the Netherlands—all have robust recycling programs that not only recycle as much as or more than the amount of trash that is burned, but they all also recycle at a much higher percentage than the U.S. has been able to accomplish. It’s the landfilling that diminishes when waste-to-energy becomes a strong option, not recycling. Germany, for instance, burns 34 percent of its municipal waste and it recycles the rest, an impressive 66 percent. That’s not just one super-green city, like San Francisco, but an entire country of 82 million people, the powerhouse economy of Europe. Almost none of its municipal waste gets landfilled.

Waste-to-energy opponents also base their negative views on the assumption that the only choice for garbage power lies in very large, expensive, utility-scale trash power plants—which, in fairness, is the only type seriously attempted in the U.S. But the most successful use of the waste-to-energy technology right now has been the smaller, less costly, community-based plants that Denmark and other European nations favor—a more distributed power generation system rather than the central utility style used in the States.

In an odd parallel, this same focus on utility-scale power plants, with their huge upfront costs and requirements for immense transmission lines, has similarly handicapped solar power development in the U.S. Other countries have focused on distributed, rooftop solar power, which does not require huge capital investment or immense transmission line upgrades. All it takes is a law compelling utilities to pay a market rate for home-brewed solar power. Germany has used this approach—called a “feed-in tariff”—to become a world leader in solar power generation, even though it has far less overall sunshine than the U.S. landscape. American utilities, meanwhile, have successfully lobbied against many such measures to boost home-based and small-scale solar, even as they cut deals based on government incentives, such as access to cheap federal land in the California desert, for large-scale solar projects that have yet to make a dent in our coal-and-oil-dependent economy.

Waste-to-energy advocates argue in favor of embracing a more distributed model for trash power in the U.S., which could work just as well in American cities as in Denmark. Steven Cohen, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, has suggested New York City try such an approach, with fifty-nine small plants, one for each community district in the city. These plants could combine waste-to-energy with recycling and anaerobic digestion for composting organic waste. It would be a far better investment, he says, than spending $300 million a year to truck garbage out of state—an investment that has nothing to show for it at the end of a year other than an immense legacy of diesel emissions. But New York politicians have been burned so many times by trash burning that no one wants to even talk about it anymore.