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About the WTE Database

This system was created to serve as a directory of the world's waste-to-energy facilities. The majority of the WTE plants around the world combust garbage in various styles of incineration unit, siphoning off the heat for direct use and/or electricity production. While the connotations of burning garbage are often not good, the facilities are quite clean especially considering the fact that they are burning garbage.

In the United States (and apparently the UK as well), the word “incineration” carries negative connotations. While this may be the case, it does not matter whether the plant is called an incinerator, combustor, waste-to-energy, energy-from-waste, resource recovery facility, or any other multitude of names, they are all doing the same thing: lighting garbage on fire.

Plasma-arc and gasification plants use a more complex approach; they convert the garbage to a combustible gas which is then used as fuel rather than completing the combustion in one step. This can allow for more efficient electricity production and better gas cleaning.

About WTE

Waste-to-Energy (WTE) is a method of waste treatment. Plastics, composite materials, and extreme heterogenity make modern municipal solid waste a treatment nightmare, and separation and recycling of everything is impractical. Landfilling remains the main method of disposition worldwide, though it is nothing more than long-term interim storage. Most wastes which are landfilled can be further treated, providing added benefits to society and the environment.

Management of waste ideally follows the hierarchy below:

  1. Don't produce waste in the first place (cut packaging, make products more durable, reduce consumerism).
  2. Reuse items which would otherwise be considered waste.
  3. Recycle the material value of waste (e.g. melt steel cans down to be used as raw steel).
  4. Recovery of the nutritive value of waste (composting of organic matter such as food scraps).
  5. Recovery of the energy value of waste (through incineration or other means).
  6. Disposal of treated residues to the environment (land application, landfilling).
  7. Dispose of waste directly to the environment without prior treatment (landfill).

WTE Benefits

Further treatment and reduction of waste with energy production, as opposed to direct landfilling, is the main benefit of waste-to-energy. The extent of this benefit will vary depending upon the nature of waste (how well have recyclable materials been separated?) and the design of the plant (is both the low-grade heat from the process utilized along with the high-grade electricity, or does the plant only utilize one?). Incineration has traditionally been used to render waste inert, to reduce its volume, and in some cases to reduce the toxicity. Energy recovery became much more commonplace beginning in the 1970s. With modern furnace designs and air pollution control equipment, the air emissions of such plants are comparable to any other power station, usually far cleaner than coal-burning plants but worse than natural gas burning plants in terms of “traditional” air pollutants, and lower than all fossil-fuel generation in terms of prehistoric carbon emissions.

WTE Downsides

Ideally, we do not produce waste in the first place. A WTE plant represents a large monetary investment, and subsequently a constant waste stream to run the plant and pay back this investment. This could theoretically lead to waste being diverted to the plant rather than source reduction/recycling efforts. Combustion of high-grade materials for energy will yield less usable energy than recycling those materials would conserve. The crux in this theory is that communities and countries with WTE as their predominant treatment method tend to have higher recycling rates and lower overall waste production. Disposal cost (WTE is usually more expensive than landfill in U.S., and not many new plants have been built) market conditions (energy prices) and/or government policy (European Union Landfill/Waste Incineration directives) can affect the use and popularity of the plants.

Emissions

By burning (or biologically digesting) organic waste instead of allowing it to decompose and produce methane in a landfill, overall greenhouse gas emissions are lowered. The production of energy and good separation of recyclable materials from this waste lowers emissions even further.

Mercury, cadmium, and other heavy metal air emissions can be highly controlled at the plant, but they are only transferred from the stack to the air pollution control residue (fly ash). Keeping these metals out of the waste stream is the only sure-fire safe option, for both landfilling and waste-to-energy.

Dioxins and other products from combustion-based WTE facilities are kept to a very low level. Activities such as campfires, wildfires, wood stoves, open burning of waste, and accidental fires results in much higher dioxin emissions per unit of material combusted than waste-to-energy plants. The emissions will never be brought to zero, and we must weigh the benefits of WTE with the emissions that do exist.

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Last Modified: October 19, 2009. 20:08:10 pm