Garbage: To Burn or To Bury

Toxins and Dioxins

Regulators in the United States and Europe are both reporting big drops in air pollution from burning garbage, says Joseph DeCarolis, an assistant professor of water resources and environmental engineering at North Carolina State University. “According to EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] data on waste-to-energy facilities in the U.S., depending on the pollutant, the levels are significantly below their standard.” Most levels, he says, are less than half the EPA limit.

 

Photo: Ecomaine A garbage burner, like a coal plant, needs sophisticated pollution controls as it converts solid fuel to energy. Although incineration reduces the volume of waste, the ash will always need burial.

Those pollution controls are expensive, and cost is a major hindrance to building new incinerators in the United States, where landfill space is relatively cheap.

In Europe, greens get along rather well with incinerators, says Damgaard, although he does note a switch in opposition from pollution worries to the greenhouse-warming impact of incineration (which we’ll discuss later).

That change, he says, is evidence that pollution controls are working. “I think they don’t use air pollution as the main problem because it’s under control now. In Europe, especially in the countries that burn waste, there is really no movement against waste-to-energy. The green organizations see it as viable, they know the alternative is burning more fossil fuel, which is just as polluting if not more so. If you go back to the 1980s, pollution was a huge issue, but in the last 10 years, incinerators have become so much cleaner.”

Competition for Recycling

Do incinerators, by establishing an alternative destination for trash, undermine recycling efforts? Yes, says van Guilder, who notes that for financial reasons, incinerator builders often require a “put or pay” contract that obliges a municipality to pay a penalty if it fails to supply a minimum cargo of waste.

When the embattled Detroit incinerator was built, the city agreed to essentially ban curbside recycling, van Guilder says. “Once the materials are set at the curb, they belong to the Detroit Department of Public Works, which is obligated to deliver all refuse to the incinerator. If a private citizen wanted to pay someone to pick up recyclables, they could be fined.”

Instead of building more incinerators, some opponents in the United States advocate a “zero waste” solution — a ramped version of reduce, reuse recycle — that would leave very little waste — but not zero — to be buried in landfills.

“To truly get to zero waste, we have a big gap,” admits van Guilder, “but if that’s the policy goal, that will give you the vision to move further to reduce, reuse, recycle. The next stage is a policy for extended producer responsibility, for take back, like we’re seeing for electronic waste, and we’ve had for lead-acid batteries, and for bottle [return] bills. These are sporadic examples that need to be more comprehensive.”

But is zero waste a real goal, or an inspiring slogan? “A lot of people are talking about a zero-waste society, but that’s a very philosophical standpoint,” counters Damgaard. “We will always have waste; those who think we can recycle 100 percent, that’s utopian.”

Instead of competing with recycling, Regan argues that the alternative to incinerators is landfills. “We think we are better than landfills, that’s our competition.” Each year, he adds, Covanta recycles more than 400,000 tons of iron, steel and aluminum that otherwise would be buried in landfills.

Recycling and incineration can compete with each other, says Matt McCullogh, an outside advisor to Covanta who works for Canada’s Pembina Institute, which advocates and consults about sustainable energy. “It’s up to the community to ensure they have a solid recycling system in place, so only what cannot be recycled goes to waste-to-energy, and the result is a win-win where there is enough energy content so the facility can be economic.”
Indeed, the European nations with the highest rates of incineration, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Austria and the Netherlands, recycle 27 percent to 54 percent of their waste.

Is “Waste” Energy Renewable Energy?

How might increased incineration affect global warming due to greenhouse gases? Incinerators are often called “waste-to-energy” plants and they are also sometimes considered sources of renewable energy, but the energy equation is extremely complex. Some of the energy in waste organic materials, including paper, is renewable, but other energy comes from plastics that originate in fossil fuel.

Could incineration excuse ever greater use of plastic? That seems to be the hope of Rusty Wheat, sustainability manager at the French petrochemical giant Total. “We’ll promote anything that increases waste-to-energy,” Wheat told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February. “We can’t recycle a lot of plastic because it’s contaminated, and cleaning it would cost more environmentally than putting it in a landfill.” The most reasonable approach now, Wheat said, “is to take bulk municipal solid waste straight to the incinerator.”

A recent bill called Waxman-Markey would give renewable energy status and tax breaks for the organic stuff that’s burned in waste-to-energy plants, Wheat said. “That excluded our plastics, and we weren’t too happy about that, and we have been lobbying to get plastics back into Waxman-Markey. Plastic is what provides all the BTU [heat] content, so waste-to-energy plants should want to burn it. We need the renewable energy status for the tax breaks.”

Waste-to-Energy, or Energy-to-Waste?

Turn the argument on its head, and you get a different result. If your goal is to save energy, the best tactic is to reuse or recycle plastic, not burn it, says van Guilder. (To which skeptics at Why Files must observe that many plastic cannot reasonably be reused or recycled, leaving a real-world choice of burning or burying.)

Incinerators release energy through combustion, and landfills create it when bacteria produce methane. This natural gas is a great fuel, but methane is also 21 times more effective than carbon dioxide in trapping greenhouse gases. Although many landfills have labyrinthine pipes to collect methane, 60 to 85 percent of the gas escapes into the air, and a recent study¹ found that counting this escape, landfills produce 1.6 to 5.7 times more greenhouse-warming as waste-to-energy to make the same amount of electricity.

The Bottom Line is the Bottom Line

Thousands of words ago, we promised to explain why Europe is so happy with its incinerators, and the United States is so fearful of them. But here’s the deal: Europe might not even have incinerators if it had enough room to build giant sacrifice zones — landfills.
“Unlike Europe, many parts of the United States are not space-constrained,” says DeCarolis. “If it were, there would be a more serious move here toward waste-to-energy.”

To be efficient, incinerators must be located near the people who generate the waste, DeCarolis says. “You don’t want to put incinerators in the middle of nowhere, because the cost of bringing all the waste is too high [and there will be no market for the steam generated]. But when you are close to a population, you run into NIMBYism. People are afraid to have these large plants near them.”

Garbage is not going away, DeCarolis adds. “If we don’t incinerate, we’ve got to do something else. We can recycle and reuse, but at some point, we’re going to end up with residual waste that will need to be landfilled.”

And landfills cause their own environmental threats – methane, groundwater pollution, and removing land from productive use, DeCarolis adds. If we don’t incinerate, he adds, “we will not get away from having an environmental impact.”

This article was originally published by The Why Files and was reprinted with permission.