Waste not, want not

During the 1980s, East Coast cities efforts to deal with trash could have been a comedy of errors if they weren’t such a serious problem. In one story still told in waste management circles today, a barge filled with more than 3,000 tons of trash sailed between New York City and Belize for more than six months while city officials tried to find a landfill to take the waste.

Things are different now. Although the amount of waste the United States generates each day rose by about one pound per person between 1980 and 2006, increased recycling and recover rates meant the amount headed to landfills decreased by about a pound as well. Still, 138.2 million tons of waste are sent to the nation’s 1,754 operating landfills annually. Seattle alone sends a mile-long train filled with garbage to Oregon every day.

On the West Coast, there’s an estimated1.5 million tons of capacity left in the region’s landfills, which currently accept 64 million tons of waste annually. That’s enough to last about 24 years.

However, landfill operators are now finding new ways to increase landfill capacity—and also limit environmentally and financially costly problems after a landfill is closed—by turning to waste-to-energy technologies that have finally come of age.

Incineration nation
Waste-to-energy is hardly new. Cultures have burned trash to create energy (heat) and manage waste for centuries. In the United States, trash incinerators appeared in places like New York City in the 1800s, but the technology by and large fell out of favor during the 1980s and 1990s, due to concerns over air quality and emissions, as well as an inability to compete with cheap power prices in some regions.

According to the National Solid Waste Management Association, in 2004—when nearly 137 million tons of waste was sent to landfills—it cost garbage haulers about $35 to dump a ton of trash in a landfill. So-called “tipping fees” at landfills with incinerators are higher however, thanks to their higher capital costs (between $110,000 and $140,000 per daily ton of capacity) and stringent regulations. In 2004, average tipping fees at incinerators reached more than $60 per ton.