Harvey Gershman, GBB President, responded to the article with some additional facts and his comments on the current state and future of Waste-To-Energy in the U.S.:
Elisabeth Rosenthal’s article, “Europe Finds Clean Energy in Trash, but U.S. Lags,” confirms what many of us in the solid waste industry have known for some time: Municipal solid waste is no longer a nuisance when the technology exists—and is used—to extract energy and raw materials on an industrial scale.
At our company, we have worked on more than 70 waste-to-energy projects, we have seen how today’s waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities in the U. S. (some 89 in number) meet the most stringent environmental standards in the world and serve as an alternative to land disposal and power generation from fossil fuels, preventing the release of tons of harmful nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. As noted by Columbia University’s Waste-to-Energy Research and Technology Council (www.wtert.org; see article http://tinyurl.com/2dwan4c ), WTE allows for energy and metals recovery, greenhouse gas reduction estimated conservatively at one ton of CO2 per ton of municipal solid waste processed by WTE rather than landfilled, and—important from the standpoint of sustainable development—land conservation. Further, WTE has a “beautiful friendship” with recycling, as the experience in many communities with WTE demonstrates. Studies show that at the local level, communities that have built WTE plants have an average recycling rate higher than the national average. Yet even with the recycling and WTE that currently exists in the U.S., over half of our waste stream is still buried in landfills.
While Ms. Rosenthal is correct that no new WTE plants have been built in the U. S. in recent years, she overlooked the fact that existing WTE facility expansions have occurred or are underway in Hillsborough County, FL; Lee County, FL; Honolulu, HI; Olmsted County, MN, and Baltimore, MD. New projects are in advanced development for Frederick County, MD; Harford County, MD; Palm Beach County, FL; and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
In the United States, we need to manage our wastes better, including doing more to reduce the amount of waste generated in the first place and boosting our recycling rate from the 30 percent level. We can expand the types of plastics collected and processed for recycling, we can do a better job of recycling away from home, and we can add food waste to other organics we already compost. We need to work collaboratively to establish national goals, such as recycling at least 50 percent of our waste, say by 2015, and then use the remaining waste for its energy value while establishing economic incentives to encourage the domestic use of both these waste-derived recyclable and energy resources. Failure to act will result in a continuation of fragmented policies, recycling plateaus, and too much waste transported and buried in landfills that get farther away from where the waste is generated in the first place. WTE needs to be in partnership with recycling so together recycling and WTE can help get us much closer to sending “zero” waste to landfills.
Harvey W. Gershman, President
Gershman, Bricker & Bratton, Inc.
Solid Waste Management Consultants www.gbbinc.com
