Europe Finds Clean Energy in Trash, but U.S. Lags
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
HORSHOLM, Denmark — The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant
enclave here are at peace with the hulking neighbor just over the back
fence: a vast energy plant that burns thousands of tons of household garbage
and industrial waste, round the clock.
A plant in Horsholm, Denmark, uses new technology to convert trash into
energy more cleanly.
The Vestforbraending plant in Copenhagen, the largest of the 29
waste-to-energy plants in Denmark. Their use has reduced the country's
energy costs.
Far cleaner than conventional incinerators, this new type of plant converts
local trash into heat and electricity. Dozens of filters catch pollutants,
from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a
decade ago.
In that time, such plants have become both the mainstay of garbage disposal
and a crucial fuel source across Denmark, from wealthy exurbs like Horsholm
to Copenhagen’s downtown area. Their use has not only reduced the country’s
energy costs and reliance on oil and gas, but also benefited the
environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide
emissions. The plants run so cleanly that many times more dioxin is now
released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues than from incineration.
With all these innovations, Denmark now regards garbage as a clean
alternative fuel rather than a smelly, unsightly problem. And the
incinerators, known as waste-to-energy plants, have acquired considerable
cachet as communities like Horsholm vie to have them built.
Denmark now has 29 such plants, serving 98 municipalities in a country of
5.5 million people, and 10 more are planned or under construction. Across
Europe, there are about 400 plants, with Denmark, Germany and the
Netherlands leading the pack in expanding them and building new ones.
By contrast, no new waste-to-energy plants are being planned or built in the
United States, the Environmental Protection Agency says — even though the
federal government and 24 states now classify waste that is burned this way
for energy as a renewable fuel, in many cases eligible for subsidies. There
are only 87 trash-burning power plants in the United States, a country of
more than 300 million people, and almost all were built at least 15 years
ago.
Instead, distant landfills remain the end point for most of the nation’s
trash. New York City alone sends 10,500 tons of residential waste each day
to landfills in places like Ohio and South Carolina.
“Europe has gotten out ahead with this newest technology,” said Ian A.
Bowles, a former Clinton administration official who is now the
Massachusetts state secretary of energy.
Still, Mr. Bowles said that as America’s current landfills topped out and
pressure to reduce heat-trapping gases grew, Massachusetts and some other
states were “actively considering” new waste-to-energy proposals; several
existing plants are being expanded. He said he expected resistance all the
same in a place where even a wind turbine sets off protests.
Why Americans Are Reluctant
Matt Hale, director of the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery of
the United States Environmental Protection Agency, said the reasons that
waste-to-energy plants had not caught on nationally were the relative
abundance of cheap landfills in a large country, opposition from state
officials who feared the plants could undercut recycling programs and a
“negative public perception.” In the United States, individual states and
municipalities generally decide what method to use to get rid of their
waste.
Still, a 2009 study by the E.P.A. and North Carolina State University
scientists came down strongly in favor of waste-to-energy plants over
landfills as the most environmentally friendly destination for urban waste
that cannot be recycled. Embracing the technology would not only reduce
greenhouse gas emissions and local pollution, but also yield copious
electricity, it said.
Yet powerful environmental groups have fought the concept passionately.
“Incinerators are really the devil,” said Laura Haight, a senior
environmental associate with the New York Public Interest Research Group.
Investing in garbage as a green resource is simply perverse when governments
should be mandating recycling, she said. “Once you build a waste-to-energy
plant, you then have to feed it. Our priority is pushing for zero waste.”
The group has vigorously opposed building a plant in New York City.
Even Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has championed green initiatives and
ranked Copenhagen’s waste-fueled heating on his list of environmental “best
practices,” has shied away from proposing to get one built.
“It is not currently being pursued — not because of the technology, which
has advanced, but because of the issue in selecting sites to build
incinerators,” said Jason Post, the mayor’s deputy press secretary on
environmental issues. “It’s a Nimby issue. It would take years of hearings
and reviews.”
Nickolas J. Themelis, a professor of engineering at Columbia University and
a waste-to-energy proponent, said America’s resistance to constructing the
new plants was economically and environmentally “irresponsible.”
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“It’s so irrational; I’ve almost given up with New York,” he said. “It’s
like you’re in a village of Hottentots who look up and see an airplane —
when everybody else is using airplanes — and they say, ‘No, we won’t do it,
it’s too scary.’ ”
Acceptance in Denmark
Attitudes could hardly be more different in Denmark, where plants are placed
in the communities they serve, no matter how affluent, so that the heat of
burning garbage can be efficiently piped into homes.
Planners take pains to separate residential traffic from trucks delivering
garbage, and some of the newest plants are encased in elaborate outer shells
that resemble sculptures.
“New buyers are usually O.K. with the plant,” said Hans Rast, president of
the homeowners’ association in Horsholm, who cut a distinguished figure in
corduroy slacks and a V-neck sweater as he poured coffee in a living room of
white couches and Oriental rugs.
“What they like is that they look out and see the forest,” he said. (The
living rooms in this enclave of town houses face fields and trees, while the
plant is roughly some 400 yards over a back fence that borders the homes’
carports). The lower heating costs don’t hurt, either. Eighty percent of
Horsholm’s heat and 20 percent of its electricity come from burning trash.
Many countries that are expanding waste-to-energy capacity, like Denmark and
Germany, typically also have the highest recycling rates; only the material
that cannot be recycled is burned.
Waste-to-energy plants do involve large upfront expenditures, and tight
credit can be a big deterrent. Harrisburg, Pa., has been flirting with
bankruptcy because of a $300 million loan it took to reopen and refit an old
public incinerator with the new technology.
But hauling trash is expensive, too. New York City paid $307 million last
year to export more than four million tons of waste, mostly to landfills in
distant states, Mr. Post said. Although the city is trying to move more of
its trash by train or barge, much of it travels by truck, with heavy fuel
emissions.
In 2009, a small portion of the city’s trash was processed at two
1990-vintage waste-to-energy plants in Newark and Hempstead, N.Y., owned by
a private company, Covanta. The city pays $65 a ton for the service — the
cheapest available way for New York City to get rid of its trash. Sending
garbage to landfills is more expensive: the city’s costliest current method
is to haul waste by rail to a landfill in Virginia.
While new, state-of-the-art landfills do collect the methane that emanates
from rotting garbage to make electricity, they churn out roughly twice as
much climate-warming gas as waste-to-energy plants do for the units of power
they produce, the 2009 E.P.A. study found. Methane, the primary warming gas
emitted by landfills, is about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, the
gas released by burning garbage.
The study also concluded that waste-to-energy plants produced lower levels
of pollutants than the best landfills did, but nine times the energy.
Although new landfills are lined to prevent leaks of toxic substances and
often capture methane, the process is highly inefficient, it noted.
Laws Spur New Technology
In Europe, environmental laws have hastened the development of
waste-to-energy programs. The European Union severely restricts the creation
of new landfill sites, and its nations already have binding commitments to
reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 2012 under the international pact
known as the Kyoto Protocol, which was never ratified by the United States.
Garbage cannot easily be placed out of sight, out of mind in Europe’s
smaller, densely populated countries, as it so often is in the United
States. Many of the 87 waste-to-energy plants in the United States are in
densely populated areas like Long Island and Cape Cod.
While these plants are generally two decades old, many have been
progressively retrofitted with new pollution filters, though few produce
both heat and power like the newest Danish versions.
In Horsholm only 4 percent of waste now goes to landfills, and 1 percent
(chemicals, paints and some electronic equipment) is consigned to “special
disposal” in places like secure storage vaults in an abandoned salt mine in
Germany. Sixty-one percent of the town’s waste is recycled and 34 percent is
incinerated at waste-to-energy plants.
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From a pollution perspective, today’s energy-generating incinerators have
little in common with the smoke-belching models of the past. They have
arrays of newly developed filters and scrubbers to capture the offending
chemicals — hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, dioxins,
furans and heavy metals — as well as small particulates.
Emissions from the plants in all categories have been reduced to just 10 to
20 percent of levels allowed under the European Union’s strict environmental
standards for air and water discharges.
At the end of the incineration process, the extracted acids, heavy metals
and gypsum are sold for use in manufacturing or construction. Small amounts
of highly concentrated toxic substances, forming a paste, are shipped to one
of two warehouses for highly hazardous materials, in the Norwegian fjords
and in a used salt mine in Germany.
“The hazardous elements are concentrated and handled with care rather than
dispersed as they would be in a landfill,” said Ivar Green-Paulsen, general
manager of the Vestforbraending plant in Copenhagen, the country’s largest.
In Denmark, local governments run trash collection as well as the
incinerators and recycling centers, and laws and financial incentives ensure
that recyclable materials are not burned. (In the United States most
waste-to-energy plants are private ventures.) Communities may drop
recyclable waste at recycling centers free of charge, but must pay to have
garbage incinerated.
At Vestforbraending, trucks stop on scales for weighing and payment before
dumping their contents. The trash is randomly searched for recyclable
material, with heavy fines for offenders.
The homeowners’ association in Horsholm has raised what its president, Mr.
Rast, called “minor issues” with the plant, like a bright light on the
chimney that shone into some bedrooms, and occasional truck noise. But
mostly, he said, it is a respected silent neighbor, producing no noticeable
odors.
The plant, owned by five adjacent communities, has even proved popular in a
conservative region with Denmark’s highest per-capita income. Morten
Slotved, 40, Horsholm’s mayor, is trying to expand it. “Constituents like it
because it decreases heating costs and raises home values,” he said with a
smile. “I’d like another furnace.”
