Climate Change: Garbage Gets Fresh Look as Source of Energy By JEFFREY BALL

Climate Change: Garbage Gets Fresh Look as Source of Energy By JEFFREY BALL

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MAY 15, 2009

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. -- Times change, and yesterday's environmental problem starts to look like today's solution. That is what is happening with trash.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. has shut down hundreds of pollution-spewing waste incinerators on the belief that burning detritus was a bigger environmental sin than burying it. Today, most American garbage is sent to landfills, some spanning hundreds of acres miles from the cities that generate the refuse. New York City, which tosses about eight million tons of nonindustrial trash each year, trucks much of it to big landfills in states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Jeffrey Ball/The Wall Street Journal.

Covanta's Hempstead, N.Y., plant burns nearly a million tons of trash a year.

Landfills have been convenient. But they are falling out of favor as improved technology and changing environmental priorities start to upend the old thinking about garbage.

Past orthodoxy held that burning trash was bad because it spewed toxic substances into the air. In an era when the big environmental threat was localized pollution like smog and cancer-causing plumes, landfills seemed the lesser evil.

Dirty air is still a concern, but now it has been eclipsed by fears of global climate change. In that calculus of environmental harm, recent research suggests, burning trash is better than burying it.

The appeal of most modern incinerators is that they don't only torch trash. They also use the heat from the incineration to boil water, which creates steam, which in turn generates electricity. Yet trash incineration produces just 0.4% of the country's electricity. Even if all U.S. garbage were burned, it wouldn't produce anywhere near enough power to meet the country's energy needs. But as concern about climate change grows, any renewable source of energy -- even a pile of garbage -- seems appealing.

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Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A9

Further Reading

The best way to deal with trash is to produce less of it. The next-best way is to recycle more of it, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But that still leaves loads of trash, and burning it to produce electricity is better than burying it in a landfill, the EPA says. Incinerating a ton of trash emits at least 35% less greenhouse gas and yields 10 times as much electricity as burying it, according to a recent study by EPA researchers.

Today, the U.S. burns 13% of its trash; it sends 54% of its trash to landfills and recycles 33% of it. Other countries, particularly countries in Europe that have less available space for landfills and fewer domestic fossil-fuel resources, burn more of their trash, according to a study by the European Environment Agency.

A bill drafted by Congressional Democrats would give incineration, known as "waste-to-energy," a boost. The bill would require utilities to produce 20% of their electricity from renewable-energy sources and energy-efficiency improvements by 2020. The bill's current version defines waste-to-energy as one form of renewable power, along with sources such as the wind and sun.

Many environmentalists worry that encouraging trash incineration will impinge on recycling efforts. A 1997 report by the Natural Resource Defense Council's Allen Hershkowitz argues that recycling rates could be dramatically improved with more effort. A 2008 study by trash consultant Eileen Brettler Berenyi concluded that trash incineration isn't restraining recycling. Her study, partly funded by the trash-incineration industry, found that U.S. communities with waste-to-energy plants tend to have higher-than-average recycling rates.

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20090515 WSJ Garbage Gets Fresh Look as Source of Energy

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