Garbage-to-energy? California has second thoughts

Government officials from around the world used to come to Long Beach, Southern California's industrial port city, to catch a glimpse of the future: Two-story piles of trash would disappear into a furnace and eventually be transformed into electricity to power thousands of homes.

Nowadays, it's U.S. officials going to Canada, Japan and parts of Western Europe to see the latest advances.

The Long Beach plant, for all its promise when it began operations roughly 20 years ago, still churns out megawatts. But it is a relic, a symbol of how California, one of America's greenest states, fell behind other countries in the development of trash-to-energy technology.

"I am having a hard time explaining why California is so far behind," said Eugene Tseng Tseng, a UCLA  law professor who spent the last three months leading delegations on overseas tours.

While so-called biorefineries have blossomed abroad, concerns that the technique would undermine recycling efforts and worsen air pollution stalled efforts in California. With space for garbage dumps dwindling, proponents of a new breed of the technology hope to win over detractors.

Los Angeles County officials want to build three plants at a total cost of $200 million to demonstrate how far the technology has come as they scramble for alternatives to closing the world's largest landfill and shipping trash four hours by rail to an abandoned gold mine near the Mexican border.

If they prove successful at reducing waste and producing power, there's no guarantee they'll usher in a new wave of garbage-gobbling technology. Efforts to pass legislation that would have given waste-to-energy plants credit toward recycling and renewable energy goals so that cities could meet state mandates hit a snag this year when some environmentalists argued that such facilities are no different from incinerators, which do not receive credits.

"We have the most aggressive goals for recycling and renewable energies but we've also got groups fighting us on solar, wind and now this," said Coby Skye with the county's Environmental Programs Division. "There are no other options if we can't get these technologies moving forward."

Part of the reason that Europe and Asia are now ahead of the United States on such technology is that they had to grapple with the lack of dump space years earlier. Many are also signatories to the Kyoto Protocol and must reduce greenhouse gases that are produced as waste decomposes in landfills.

The county plan, which still needs financing and permitting, is to build three demonstration plants in Riverside and Orange counties. They would either use heat to turn trash to energy or use microorganisms, which would eat organic material and create methane to produce power. The byproduct can also be used as compost.

Each plant would be a little smaller than a typical biorefinery and would convert as much as 300 tons of trash per day, accepting trash from all over. Los Angeles County alone produces about 33,000 tons of garbage a day.

The plant in Long Beach, which was completed in 1988, consumes about 1,550 tons of trash per day. Unrecyclable garbage is fed into a furnace and the steam generated from burning the trash is used to drive a turbine generator, producing enough electricity to power 35,000 homes. The resulting ash is also used to pave roads at the county's dump.

Scott Smithline with Californians Against Waste, an opposition group, said he has toured such facilities around the world. To build a clean-burning plant in an area synonymous with smog, he said, garbage costs would soar. He also fears that efforts to increase the mandate that cities recycle half of their garbage will fail if communities have contracted to send that waste to a biorefinery.

"What Californians care about is, 'Is the air going to be clean?'" he said. "What I don't want to see is this done on the cheap." Critics call the technology experimental and say building such refineries would be a step back to the 1970s and '80s, when incinerators were a top producer of toxic air contaminants.

But Bill Welch, an emissions experts at UC Riverside said new biorefineries produce about the same amount of pollution as refineries, chemical plants, dry cleaners and auto body shops. "Incinerators got a horrible reputation and deservedly so, but since then, the air pollution technology is so sophisticated," said Welch, who was contracted by the Bioenergy Producers Assn. to study facilities around the world.

"As an environmental scientist, I think the biggest threat we face is global warming. That's going to make many more people sick than any of the emissions from these plants will," he said.

Striking a balance between fresh air and fewer greenhouse gases remains a challenge, and has some environmentalists saying it's time to look at alternatives. "The current situation with our trash, both because of our over-consumption and over-reliance on landfills, is not sustainable," said Martin Schlageter, who heads the Coalition for Clean Air. "All options have to be on the table."

The Navy has partnered with UCLA to study biorefineries in an effort to meet a national renewable energy plan that includes half of the agency's energy usage coming from alternative sources by 2020.
Leslie L. McLaughlin, the solid waste program manager for the Navy Region Southwest in San Diego, said she wants to make sure they proceed carefully. "My focus on this is to make sure we don't create one environmental problem by trying to solve another," she said.

-- Associated Press

Photo: A truck driver, left, unloads solid waste operator at the South East Reserve Recovery Facility (SERRF) in Long Beach, Calif. Twenty five years ago California was at the forefront of the trash-to-energy conversion technology but now lags other U.S. states and foreign nations. Credit: Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press

Comments

[Chris]

The company called PLASCO Energy Group has developed a process called plasma gasification that is a much cleaner technology that could generate electricity and not pollute the same as incineration. California needs to look into this technology for the future.

[tomdavis]

Progress on this technology was killed off by environmentalists. As stated in the article, environmentalists were convinced that it would discourage recycling and create pollution. Everyone caved in into the environmental activists and now, instead of being world leaders in this important technology, we're wiping up the rear.

[save the deserts!]

When I visited Switzerland 20 years ago, they already had a 3-section trash system in every house: compost, recycle, trash. If we would just do this simple system, we could eliminate most of our trash immediately and what little is left can be used to make methane.

It's vested interests, not smog or cost, that keep us from doing the right things. Same with Big Energy - they are now killing millions of acres of wilderness to make the same exact amount of solar power we could generate on our own rooftops - because utilities get paid a fortune for new powerlines and for (ahem) "green" power, and "green energy" saviors like BP, Chevron and Goldman Sachs make a fortune from killing public land, monopolizing our power supply, and getting the "greenwash" from NRDC and friends.

It is an absolute myth that more net power per installed MW will derive from desert CSP than from in-city PV, or that it will cost less. Democratically owned, point of use efficiency and PV are the fastest, cheapest, cleanest and fairest way to move into a renewable future. Same with water catchment, and trash sorting.

All we need are the right policies, but when our own LADWP profits from doing the wrong things (wasting water, killing wilderness for energy profits) and from preventing us from doing the right things (where is our feed in tariff and our PACE loans?), how do we get the right policies in place?

[JA]

Talk about burying the lead!

"...they scramble for alternatives to closing the world's largest landfill and shipping trash four hours by rail to an abandoned gold mine near the Mexican border"

Yea! Our greed dug that hole in the ground, and our wasteful over-consumption will fill it back up! Future generations will use it as a monument to the stupidity and short-sightedness of the 20th and 21st century Americans. An ugly, reeking, toxic hole in the ground.

Here's the answer: Charge for trash collection by the pound. Until people are financially responsible for their wastefulness, they'll continue to be wasteful.
That, and make recycling mandatory, and make it a crime with heavy fines for throwing anything recyclable in the trash. This is just common sense.
It should also be illegal to sell water in anything less than a 1 gallon bottle. All of those little PET bottles that people buy by the gross at big box stores- illegal.

Those of us that don't over-consume and waste, that recycle and compost their green waste will be rewarded, those that don't will be penalized. Perfect.

[mark burns springer]

It is important to remember that no solution meets all goals. No answer is perfect. We should move forward with the best answer available in a reasonable amount of time.

[8rotherdallas]

its not easy being green?

[J.Thur]

California is so far behind, because It's leaders still look to the past for answers. Instead of embracing change & the future, California is stuck in a spin cycle of politicians who only seek to fatten their wallets with Tax-payer money I.E. (The city of Bell).

In Europe, Austria heads the EU in its recycling efforts with approximately 60% of its waste being recycled, where as the United States is only recycling a mere 28% of waste!

Finally, of all of the countries in the world and populations the United States makes up about 5% of the world’s population. The United States is also the world’s largest trash producing country at 1,609 pounds of trash per person per year.

What this means is that just 5% of the world’s population produces about 40% of the worlds waste and with the total rate ofrecycling in the United States being only at about 28%; well, there is a great need for improvement.