Right next to a landfill in Northern California, just
past a stack emitting methane from rotting
garbage, there's an entirely different type of waste
management facility that's burning trash instead of
burying it.
That crane picks up about seven tons of trash with
each grab and it's slowly fed into the chute for
combustion.
This combustion is known as waste-to-energy or energy
recovery because it's used to generate electricity. The
intense heat converts water in 21 miles of pipes around
the combustor into steam that turns a turbine. It
also creates carbon and toxic ash. But unlike
landfills, it doesn't emit any methane. 2,000 degrees
Fahrenheit, very efficient burn, making 23 megawatts
and we only use about three megawatts to operate the
whole facility.
Part of what's burned here is some 27,000 annual tons
of waste from big companies like American Airlines,
Quest Diagnostics, Sunny D and Subaru. They're part of
a growing movement by companies and governments to
send less to landfills.
You can see there are some car seats and the like. This
actually comes from an automotive manufacturer that
doesn't want to send these materials to a landfill.
Amazon and other retailers also use this combustion to
dispose of returns they deem unfit to recycle, resell or
donate.
It is our absolute last resort, both economically as
well as environmentally.
We went to a facility run by Covanta, one of the biggest
U.S. energy recovery companies to see the process
firsthand and find out why big companies like Amazon
and parts of Europe and Asia have embraced burning their
waste while most of the U.S. keeps piling it up in
landfills.
With returns pouring in at record numbers, items like
discarded clothes generate an estimated 5.8 billion
pounds of landfill waste each year. With an estimated
return rate over 20%, online purchases are more likely to
be returned than those bought in-store. Yet Amazon
says they send no items to landfills. We wanted to find
out how that was possible.
There are a number of items that we can't recover or are
not recyclable, and for reasons such as legal
reasons, or hygienic reasons, or even product
damage. And in those cases, we do pursue energy recovery
for those items.
While Covanta says it doesn't handle Amazon
returns, and Amazon wouldn't share who does, Covanta says
about 10% of its business comes from corporate clients
like Subaru, which likes to advertise it's building cars
in zero-landfill plants.
For us, we wanted to be zero landfill because we wanted
to produce the car in a very environmentally friendly
way. What's in it for us is we want to do the right
thing.
When a major car manufacturer like Subaru
says they're zero landfill, they have done the reduce,
the reuse, the recycle. And what's leftover they send to
a facility like a waste-to-energy facility.
It's the fastest growing part of the business because
businesses are understanding sustainability. And they're
understanding that one of the major elements of
sustainability is waste management.
It's a corporate marketing trick to say, ah, we're
going to make energy from this. Well that always
sounds good, right? We all need energy. And people
don't realize what it means is we're actually burning
it.
But climate experts say the carbon-intensive process
provides a net reduction of greenhouse gases for three
reasons. It keeps waste out of landfills which emit far
more harmful methane. 700,000 tons of metal is
recovered by the process each year, reducing the need
for mining. And it replaces energy that could otherwise
be made by burning fossil fuels.
For every ton of garbage that you burn, you save a
ton of CO2 that you would otherwise create from, say,
burning a fossil fuel or something. When you compare
that to a landfill, every legitimate study shows that
the environmental impact of a landfill is more than
sending to a waste-to-energy facility.
Landfills make up 17% of methane emissions and the
global warming impact of methane is 86 times greater
than carbon dioxide on a 20-year time frame. But the
bigger problem is, why do we have so much waste in the
first place? The U.S. is one of the most wasteful
developed countries in the world, with some of the most
trash generated per person, per day. Marco Castaldi of
the City College of New York has been working in the
combustion space for 20 years.
We produce about four pounds per person per day. And to
give you an idea of what that's like, that's, you
know, your outfit that you're wearing today,
instead of taking it off and putting it in the wash, you
throw it away. In Europe, in Japan, the amount of waste
that's generated is about half that. While it's
indisputable that recycling and composting are far
better, not all materials can go that route. So what
do we do with the record 292 million tons of waste
generated by Americans each year? More than half is
landfilled, while about a third is recycled and 12% is
incinerated at waste-to-energy facilities.
There are approximately 70 to 80 waste-to-energy
facilities compared to say 1,450 active landfills.
In parts of Europe and Asia, those numbers are flipped.
When you look at how much waste is actually combusted
versus landfill, it's really kind of sad.
Countries like Japan, Denmark and Germany rely on
energy recovery far more than landfills. In the EU,
waste incineration doubled from 1995 to 2019. But
critics like Neil Tangri of the Global Alliance for
Incinerator Alternatives argue some countries have
over-added capacity for the carbon-intensive process.
Denmark now realizes that it incinerates too much waste
and if it is going to meet its greenhouse gas emissions
targets it's going to need to reduce waste
incineration. Sweden overbuilt waste incineration
and now imports waste from other countries to keep its
waste incinerators burning because you can't just shut
them down.
In the U.S., the first incinerator was built in New
York in 1895 and by 1905, the city was using it to
generate enough electricity to light the Williamsburg
More than half of U.S. states define
waste-to-energy as a renewable energy source. And
unlike landfills, many governments and NGOs
consider it a source of greenhouse gas mitigation,
including the Environmental Protection Agency, where
Susan Thorneloe leads research on materials
Is it better for clean electricity production to
burn or bury waste, and it was hands down better to
combust it because you get energy value from it, you
get metals from it and you're not producing
To understand why many environmental scientists and
more and more companies prefer combustion with
energy recovery over landfill, let's take a look
at how it works.
In that big building is where the waste is combusted
and steam is made from it. The steam then goes to a
turbine that spins because of the steam, sort of like a
jet engine. And that then turns the generator that
makes the electricity.
Paul Gilman runs sustainability efforts for
all of Covanta's 40-plus facilities, which he says
produce enough power for about a million homes. The
Stanislaus facility was built in 1989.
At this facility, we process about 270,000 tons of waste
a year for the county. And that's enough to really run
about 18,000 homes.
This facility also recovers more than 5,000 tons of
metal each year from the burned remains of the waste,
like these chunks of unrefined valuable metals
that will be sold and turned back into things like
aluminum cans and copper pipes.
You'd be amazed what people put in their garbage. It's
everything from the occasional mattress, but we
can go ahead and get the metal springs out and the
like and recycle that, something that if it went to
the landfill it'd be lost for the good.
Tons of aluminum that's recovered from these
facilities, tons of copper. And instead of extracting it
out of the ground, okay, that's already been done.
And now it's safe to use again.
The steam can also be captured and used again,
piped up to a mile away to heat or cool entire
buildings. There's a waste-to-energy facility
that's in Minnesota that uses the heat to heat the
Minnesota Twins baseball field, and they run it
underneath the grass to keep the grass alive in the
wintertime.
In Paris, 50% of the city's heating needs are met using
three waste-to-energy plants. Landfills can also
harness energy from the methane produced by rotting
organic material, but far less efficiently. Landfill
gas generates enough power for 810,000 U.S. homes per
year, compared to 2.3 million homes powered by far
fewer waste-to-energy facilities.
We recover almost 10 times more energy from a given
amount of waste than is recovered from a landfill.
The EPA estimates that for every megawatt-hour of
electricity generated, waste-to-energy emits an
average of just over half a metric ton of carbon dioxide
equivalent gases. Landfills emit six times that and coal
plants emit nearly double.
You don't see what people think might be soot or dark
smoke because that's what the air pollution control
system manages.
Covanta's public data shows emissions coming out of the
stack in Stanislaus are far below U.S. federal
standards. That's because Covanta cleans toxins out of
its smoke and combusted gases using an intense
filtration process with activated carbon and
limestone scrubbers before it comes out of the stack.
The air pollution control systems that weren't present
on old fashioned incinerators, the object of
a lot of people's ire. But today this facility
contributes less than 1% to the particulate matter in
this county.
Dioxin and mercury are some of the most dangerous
emissions that concern critics like GAIA, who point
to facilities like one in the Netherlands, which
regulators found was emitting so much dioxin, it
was contaminating grass and chicken eggs in the
surrounding area.
Despite the air pollution control equipments and the
monitoring, there are still a lot of toxins in that
smoke from particulates to heavy metals, lead, mercury,
arsenic, cadmium, and you know, here in the U.S., our
monitoring systems and our standards are much lower
than in Europe.
But other scientists say air pollution technology has
come so far in the last two decades that most common
toxins have largely been eliminated.
Studies have been done that have shown the amount of,
say, dioxin that's emitted from all waste-to-energy
facilities in one year is less, is a fraction of what
gets formed from forest fires.
But the incineration process does still produce a lot of
toxic ash. The environmental regulators require that we
test our ash on a regular basis to see if we can leach
out anything like a heavy metal, like mercury, or
cadmium or leads. And happily, we've always passed
our tests.
In Europe, they separate the more toxic fly ash and use
the safer bottom ash to make things like concrete for
road construction. But in the U.S., the fly and bottom
ash are usually mixed together, making it too
toxic to be reused. So it's buried.
So behind us is the ash fill that we use for all the ash
that's come from this plant for the 30 years it's been
in operation. It's all right there.
There's probably more municipal solid waste ash
that we can use. But because of the negative connotation,
I just don't see that occurring.
And waste-to-energy facilities, along with
landfills, are infamous for being built in
disproportionately poor communities.
Nobody wants to live next to an incinerator, or really
any waste facility. And wealthy communities and
white communities generally had the political power to
stop it.
People ask, is it safe? And my immediate answer is yes.
People asked me, would you live near one? My immediate
answer is yes, I did for years before I knew anything
about this industry. My town that my kids grew up in was
a town that had one of these facilities.
And yet, the U.S. has only 76 waste-to-energy
facilities compared to 410 in Europe. The Covanta
facility we visited is one of only two in California.
There's a real question about why California, and
why most of the U.S. for that matter, are so in love
with our landfills. But it's a fact. It happens that we
have a lot of land, something Europe didn't have
that luxury with.
It also comes down to the money. Landfills in the U.S.
are big business. While waste-to-energy is a $10
billion industry, the overall waste management
industry is at $208 billion. Landfill companies like
Waste Management and Republic Services have
outperformed the market since 2015, allowing them to
keep prices down and keep business up.
For a ton of garbage, how much does it cost to you
know, make it go away? And if you send it to a
landfill, the nominal average around the country
is it's somewhere between $50 and $70 per ton. To send
it to a waste-to-energy facility is somewhere
between say $85 and $120.
One of the reasons Europe is different is because they're
imposing, basically, a tax on anything that would go to
a landfill.
But waste-to-energy is also a moneymaker, with the EPA
estimating revenues at $20 to $30 per ton of waste.
Covanta was on a big upward swing before it went private
last year when a Swedish investment firm bought it
for $5.3 billion. In fact, incineration is one of the
most expensive commercial ways to generate energy and
to handle waste. So why then are companies like Amazon
burning their waste instead of burying it?
If Amazon sends all of its returns to a landfill,
somebody could go to the landfill and see them. And
that would be a horrifying visual. And when you burn
something, you hide the evidence.
And in some scenarios, burning it for energy may be
the better financial choice.
When we think about negotiated rates, the fees
could be closer and in other areas, in some cases the the
waste-to-energy tip fees are reasonably competitive with
landfill tip fees in part because of that restriction
on landfill airspace or the lack of available places to
take that.
Another consideration is the carbon emissions from
transporting waste.
Sending it to waste-to-energy may be a
1,000-mile transport proposition. The closest
waste-to-energy facility, we've got to haul it by rail
halfway across the United States to get it there
because you typically find most waste-to-energy
facilities located in the northeast part of the United
States, in Florida, in Minnesota.
The reality is, both energy recovery and landfills are
far less green than reducing, reusing or
recycling.
You're arguing for last place. We know that the
important thing to do is to keep as much material and
particularly organics out of the waste stream. If Amazon
returns were being repackaged and sold to
people at a discount instead of being disposed of, then
we wouldn't have to have this question about whether
it's better or worse to bury plastic or burn it.
Amazon has indeed been adding programs to make sure
more returns are resold as used, refurbished or
liquidated and says it's working toward a goal of
zero product disposal, although it wouldn't give a
target date for that lofty promise.
It also wouldn't share the breakdown for how many
returns go to energy recovery.
If you look in nature, there is no waste. Everything's
used in some way. And so ideally that's the focus.
That's the direction that EPA would like to go, but
we're not there yet. And so how can we best manage the
different materials?
Until consumer behavior changes, waste-to-energy
plants will continue to offer a landfill alternative
for big corporations and local governments like
Stanislaus County, where Covanta's most recent
15-year contract extends through 2027.
Would we want to see no waste generation?
Absolutely. But we're not there technologically yet.
And we're not there policy wise yet. So if I can make
heat out of it and use it to heat homes, or I can make
electricity out of it and offset coal that's being
mined, then that would be far better than that not
happening at all.