Burning Trash for Energy: 👍 or 👎 ?

This is the waste-to-energy plant (WtE) in Spokane, one of 75 functioning plants in the entire US and one of two in the Pacific NW. It is owned and operated by the City of Spokane, built in 1990 for $110M, and has a $32M annual operating budget. The plant generates approximately 18 kilowatts of energy per day, and uses 2-3 of those kilowatts to operate the plant; the rest is sold to the local electricity company at a price that fluctuates based on cost of electricity. Annual revenues from electricity are $5-6M. The plant accepts residential construction and demolition waste, but commercial waste must still go to the landfill. 

Spokane’s WtE facility is an energy recovery plant, meaning that it burns material and captures gas released to generate fuel, typically in the form of electricity. Waste-to-energy recycling is much more common in Europe and Asia, usually because they have less land mass than the US. Places like Japan, Sweden, Germany, and Singapore have been burning and generating energy from their waste for a long time. In the US, waste-to-energy is still largely contested as a sustainable method of recycling.

We haven’t had an incentive to invest more infrastructure in waste-to-energy in the US because we do have so much land, and because electricity has traditionally been fairly inexpensive (which means there isn’t a lot of profit in selling electricity generated from a WtE plant).

Also, the three largest waste management companies in the US generate about 60% of their revenues from landfill tipping fees, meaning that municipalities pay to dump waste at a landfill that a private waste management company owns. Landfills are lucrative business.