Incinerators are NOT “waste-to-energy” facilities

Note to Jour­nal­ists and Activists:
Incin­er­a­tors are NOT “waste-to-ener­gy” facilities

There is no such thing as waste-to-ener­gy. “Waste-to-ener­gy” is a pub­lic rela­tions term used by incin­er­a­tor pro­mot­ers, but is not an accu­rate term, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, as there is no such thing. In the big­ger pic­ture, they’re waste-OF-ener­gy facilities.

Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, there is no such thing as “waste-to-ener­gy.” Mat­ter can­not be turned into ener­gy with­out a nuclear reac­tion, and thank­ful­ly, that’s not what is hap­pens with incin­er­a­tors. What is actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing is that waste is turned into tox­ic ash and tox­ic air emis­sions while a small frac­tion of the ener­gy in the waste is recov­ered in the process.

In the envi­ron­men­tal advo­ca­cy com­mu­ni­ty, we’ve come to call them “waste-OF-ener­gy” facil­i­ties because we know that recy­cling and com­post­ing the same dis­card­ed mate­ri­als saves 3–5 times as much ener­gy as incin­er­a­tors can recov­er. This was first doc­u­ment­ed in 1996, and the basic laws of physics haven’t changed since then.[1] It’s self-evi­dent, as all of the ener­gy it takes to make paper, for instance (cut­ting trees, truck­ing them to a paper mill, burn­ing coal to pow­er the mill, ship­ping the paper around more…) isn’t all present in the paper itself, as much of it went up the smoke­stacks at the mill or the tailpipes of the log­ging and truck­ing equip­ment. Recy­cling the same paper saves that ener­gy by avoid­ing new extrac­tion and production.

What is an incinerator?

Dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion: Incin­er­a­tor — noun — a fur­nace or appa­ra­tus for burn­ing trash, garbage, etc., to ash­es. (dictionary.com)

U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agen­cy’s legal def­i­n­i­tion:

Munic­i­pal waste com­bus­tor, MWC, or munic­i­pal waste com­bus­tor unit: (1) Means any set­ting or equip­ment that com­busts sol­id, liq­uid, or gasi­fied [munic­i­pal sol­id waste] includ­ing, but not lim­it­ed to, field-erect­ed incin­er­a­tors (with or with­out heat recov­ery), mod­u­lar incin­er­a­tors (starved-air or excess-air), boil­ers (i.e., steam-gen­er­at­ing units), fur­naces (whether sus­pen­sion-fired, grate-fired, mass-fired, air cur­tain incin­er­a­tors, or flu­idized bed-fired), and pyrolysis/combustion units.[2]

Else­where, EPA con­firms that a “munic­i­pal waste com­bus­tor” is the same thing as a “munic­i­pal waste incinerator.”[3]

From this def­i­n­i­tion, we see that var­i­ous types of burn­ers, includ­ing those that most insist that they are not incin­er­a­tors (name­ly, pyrol­y­sis, gasi­fi­ca­tion and plas­ma arc facil­i­ties) are indeed incin­er­a­tors. The Euro­pean Union has sim­i­lar legal def­i­n­i­tions that make it clear that pyrol­y­sis, gasi­fi­ca­tion and plas­ma tech­nolo­gies are indeed incinerators.

Is it an incin­er­a­tor or a pow­er plant?

The indus­try prefers to be seen in a more pos­i­tive light: as pow­er plants, not as waste dis­pos­al facil­i­ties. Near­ly all trash incin­er­a­tors pro­duce (nom­i­nal amounts of) ener­gy. Ener­gy pro­duc­tion does not make them stop being incin­er­a­tors. Waste incin­er­a­tors make more mon­ey being paid to take waste than they make sell­ing ener­gy. Accord­ing to the lat­est data from the Ener­gy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion, trash incin­er­a­tion is the most expen­sive type of elec­tric­i­ty pro­duc­tion to build or oper­ate, so no ener­gy com­pa­ny in their right mind would choose trash burn­ing as an eco­nom­i­cal way to make energy.

Ted Michaels, pres­i­dent of the trash incin­er­a­tor indus­try’s trade asso­ci­a­tion, the Ener­gy Recov­ery Coun­cil, admit­ted on cam­era in tes­ti­fy­ing before Wash­ing­ton, DC City Coun­cil on March 18, 2013 that “waste-to-ener­gy” facil­i­ties (incin­er­a­tors) are pri­mar­i­ly waste facil­i­ties, not pow­er plants. This was in response to our tes­ti­mo­ny stat­ing that trash incin­er­a­tors are the most expen­sive and pol­lut­ing way to make ener­gy or to dis­pose of waste, where Ener­gy Jus­tice direc­tor, Mike Ewall, doc­u­ment­ed how much dirt­i­er they are than coal pow­er plants. In response, Ted Michaels admit­ted that incin­er­a­tors are more expen­sive than land­fills and that they’re dirt­i­er than coal pow­er plants. The only way he could wig­gle out of the com­par­i­son to coal plants is to admit that “a waste-to-ener­gy plant is designed to man­age sol­id waste… the elec­tric­i­ty out­put is a sec­ondary func­tion.”[4]

Fur­ther evi­dence that incin­er­a­tors are waste facil­i­ties and not pow­er plants can be found in the Penn­syl­va­nia Waste Indus­tries Asso­ci­a­tion’s 2013 com­ments chal­leng­ing an incin­er­a­tor’s per­mit and in this 2010 inter­nal memo among Penn­syl­va­nia Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion staff, spelling out that the largest trash incin­er­a­tor in the nation is clas­si­fied as a waste facil­i­ty, not an ener­gy gen­er­at­ing facil­i­ty, for regulatory/permitting purposes.

The longest-run­ning news cov­er­age of a sin­gle incin­er­a­tor (in Har­ris­burg, PA) calls it an incinerator.

The longest-run­ning incin­er­a­tor in the U.S. is the one in Har­ris­burg, PA, oper­at­ing since 1972, with a few years down as they com­plete­ly rebuilt it from 2002 through 2006. As of 2014, it’s now both the old­est and newest incin­er­a­tor in the nation. The Har­ris­burg Patri­ot News has con­sis­tent­ly described it as an incin­er­a­tor. Search their web­site and you’ll see about 45,200 hits for the term incin­er­a­tor com­pared to only 612 hits for the term “waste-to-ener­gy.” Both the old and rebuilt incin­er­a­tors in Har­ris­burg, as well as the near­by Lan­cast­er incin­er­a­tor (where most of the “waste-to-ener­gy” terms are applied in the arti­cles) use sim­i­lar tech­nolo­gies, all of which fit firm­ly with­in EPA’s def­i­n­i­tion of a munic­i­pal waste com­bus­tor. The only dif­fer­ence is that the Lan­cast­er incin­er­a­tor is more aggres­sive about their use of pub­lic relations.

Ref­er­ences

[1] Mor­ris, Jef­frey, and Can­zoneri, Diana, “Recy­cling Ver­sus Incin­er­a­tion: An Ener­gy Con­ser­va­tion Analy­sis,” Sound Resource Man­age­ment Group (SRMG) Seat­tle, Jour­nal of Haz­ardous Mate­ri­als, Vol 47, Issues 1–3, pp. 277–293 (1996). http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304389495001166 The val­ues used are avail­able in a chart titled “Recy­cling Ver­sus Incin­er­a­tion: An Ener­gy Con­ser­va­tion Analy­sis” on p. 32 of the “Waste Incin­er­a­tion: A Dying Tech­nol­o­gy” report by the Glob­al Alliance for Incin­er­a­tor Alter­na­tives (GAIA).

[2] 40 CFR 60.51a. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2012-title40-vol7/xml/CFR-2012-title40-vol7-part60.xml#seqnum60.51a

[3] U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency set­tled this in 1992: “A munic­i­pal waste incin­er­a­tor ‘com­busts’ sol­id waste and thus is func­tion­al­ly syn­ony­mous with munic­i­pal waste com­bus­tor.” http://www.epa.gov/ttn/nsr/gen/rm_2.html

[4] Ted Michaels, Pres­i­dent, Ener­gy Recov­ery Coun­cil, March 18, 2013 tes­ti­mo­ny before Wash­ing­ton, DC City Coun­cil. Video of the hear­ing before the Com­mit­tee on Trans­porta­tion and the Envi­ron­ment is here: http://dc.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=29&clip_id=1662 See 1:46 for the quote.