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In a TV advertisement, shot in black and white, actress Jennifer Garner brews a cup of coffee in her kitchen using a reusable mesh coffee filter. “Brew Anew,” the ad preaches: Don’t take up landfill space with disposable filters. A series of similar celebrity-studded environmental ads that aired during the Live Earth rock concert this summer suggested that small, painless sacrifices – turning the thermostat by one degree, changing a light-bulb – deserve a major pat on the back. Garner whistles to herself in her eco ad-spot, satisfied that she has done her part toward saving Earth’s landfills from overflowing with disposable coffee filters.
It could be argued that even such superficial environmental awareness is a step in the right direction. According to William Calogero, executive director of the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency, many people’s knowledge of waste processing is limited to the day of the week their bins go out on the street. “Most people put their garbage out on the curb and don’t know where it has gone,” he said. But with the rise of recycling, Calogero says more people are beginning to pay attention to trash.
What became of the paper coffee filters you threw away before you heeded Garner’s advice? In Dutchess County, about half of all garbage collected – or 153,000 tons each year – goes to the Dutchess County Resource Recovery Agency (DCRRA), a facility tucked away on Sand Dock Road in the Town of Poughkeepsie, beyond the IBM campus and off Spackenkill Road.
Garbage is processed at the plant and turned into 50,000 megawatts of energy per year, enough to power 10,000 homes, according to Calogero. Waste-to-energy facilities, which were formerly called “burn plants,” conjure up images of “55-gallon drums burning in the backyard somewhere,” Calogero said. The thick, foul clouds of smoke one might envision swirling above the facility were nowhere to be seen. In fact, no smoke was visible from the stacks on a clear day during a recent tour of the facility – despite the fact that the plant was up and operating.
There are about 89 similar waste-to-energy (WTE) plants nationwide. The agency funded a $14.8 million upgrade to the pollution-control system at the plant, which went online in 2005. Those “scrubbers,” as they are called, clean toxic mercury, sulfur dioxide (a component of acid rain) and hydrogen chloride out of the exhaust, reducing toxic emissions to well within state and federal requirements.
But Stephen Lynch, president of R.S. Lynch and Company, which has advised more than a dozen public-sector clients on their waste management, says that the reason so few waste-to-energy facilities are still in operation around the nation is that they are no longer the preferred method of processing trash. Lynch, a consultant in the development of environmental facilities, believes Dutchess County’s plant should be mothballed or privatized. In its place, Lynch suggests boosting recycling efforts and disposal of garbage in a landfill. Single bins where residents can place all recyclables – rather than sorting plastics, metals and papers – would be one way to increase recycling, he said. The rest of the waste, according to Lynch, should be taken to “a modern, state-of-the art landfill.” Contemporary landfills capture and reuse methane gas as an energy source.
Why does Lynch recommend dumping trash into landfills, rather than burning it for energy? “You have to look at the total picture,” said Lynch. “If you take the point-of-view of the taxpayer, why subsidize the production of electricity?”
Providing the backing
With a Legislature vote last month, the county extended an agreement to provide financial backing to the DCRRA through 2027. Under the agreement, county taxpayers pay “net service fees” that cover the shortfall when the agency’s revenues don’t cover its costs. The fees vary each year, and the amount of debt service the agency pays has a major impact on them. In 2006, net service fees were $2.1 million. The county’s backing has a positive impact on the agency’s credit rating, allowing DCRRA to issue bonds on more favorable terms (generally lowering annual net service fees) as it pays for the $14.8 million pollution-control system that went online in 2005.
Calogero, who served for 10 years on the agency’s board before becoming executive director in 2006, holds bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and physics, with a graduate degree in business. He holds several patents on medical devices from an earlier phase in his career.
Calogero points out that revenues generated from the plant – from producing energy sales and tipping fees – cover the cost of running it and have the added benefit of reducing dependency on fossil fuels. He maintains the only thing not covered by revenues is the debt service on capital investments. “We could hold our own with the exception of debt service,” said Calogero. The debt service on the agency’s original investment in the plant, which came online in the late 1980s, will be paid down by 2014.
But Lynch, a Millbrook resident, says the scrubbers were a mistake. “They shouldn’t be upgrading it,” said Lynch of the facility, “They should be mothballing it and sending (refuse) to one of several large landfills in New York State that would love to have our trash – at half the cost.” Selling the facility to a private company could be a possibility, according to Lynch, who believes that at the very least, county officials should have studied and analyzed their options – services his firm provides – before extending the county’s agreement through 2027. “Where’s the analysis that shows continuing to use this plant is better than backing away?” he asked.
Many towns and counties in the region have hired his company to study the issue. Wallingford, Conn. has a waste-to-energy plant that came online nearly 20 years ago. The town’s contract on the plant is set to expire in 2010, and Wallingford is now in the middle of a multi-year study to determine what to do next.
But Calogero says the agency did study the options to upgrading the plant – including closing it –using its own experts and the national engineering firm HDR, based in Nebraska. The use of dry lime for pollution control was one such option that was less expensive than scrubbers, but ultimately unreliable. Shutting down the plant was “discounted because this was the technology the county wanted,” said Calogero. The Legislature was kept informed of the process with quarterly letters, and in Aug. 2004 the agency decided to move forward with scrubbers. Legislators received a letter about the decision in January 2005.
While Lynch says that landfills are likely a better option, Calogero and the facility manager at DCRRA, Roy Chance, argue that waste-to-energy plants incorporate recycling and are the preferred method in Europe. Calogero, who has lived there, says European waste management plants are “far ahead” of U.S. facilities in their technology. Calogero believes that recovering energy is a viable way to recycle, whereas expecting residents to voluntarily become near-perfect recyclers, as advocated by some, is unrealistic: “Maybe in another generation or two,” said Calogero. Lynch counters that incinerating and processing trash is not considered recycling by state Department of Environmental Conservation standards.
As for carting waste to landfills, Calogero points to the added cost – both to the county pocketbook and the environment – of the fuel required to haul 153,000 tons of garbage on a 250-mile trip each way. He estimates that such a trip requires about 625,000 gallons of fuel per year, contributing to greenhouse gas issues. As Dutchess County does not have any of its own landfills, refuse would likely have to be hauled to western and northern parts of the state.
In European cities, there is little space for landfills, one reason they have developed sophisticated waste-to-energy plants. Calogero has reviewed one such plant that lies less than two miles from the Eiffel Tower. There, he marveled at multiple scrubbers that purified the gas. Located in the middle of the city, “It doesn’t even look like a plant,” he said. But Chance points out that Europeans are traditionally more willing to pay for technology with their taxes. The way a society disposes of its garbage is a measure of its values, Chance said.
“It’s important to have a thorough understanding of the alternatives,” said Calogero. “There aren’t that many proven alternatives for use on a large scale.”
Burning 153,000 tons of garbage processed at the plant produces about 50,000 tons of ash per year. That ash is dumped into long-haul trucks, covered with tarp and carried out to landfills, where it is often used as a cap to cover garbage. Air space is reduced by 90 percent after garbage is burned to ash.
When garbage trucks arrive on the Sand Dock Road compound, they are first weighed to determine load. The trucks dump refuse into a vast pit that holds up to 3,200 tons.
The smell of the pit on a recent tour was surprisingly innocuous – little worse than driving behind a garbage truck on a hot day. Ventilation overhead helps mitigate the smell, and the result was not overpowering from 25 feet away.
The claw of a refuse crane overhead scoops out the garbage and drops it into a chute where it enters the combustion chamber. No fuel is required to ignite the garbage – only heat within the chamber. Most items, including soft metals like aluminum, burn up in the fire, though scrap metals that do not are carted out for recycling. Ash is cooled and loaded into trailers that are hauled off to landfills, where it is used as a cover. Water is heated into steam, and the steam powers a turbine generator. Electricity feeds out to Central Hudson’s grid.
Back at the incinerator plant, gases go through the purifying process. Lime slurry is injected into a drying chamber called a spray dry absorber or “scrubber,” and it chemically reacts, removing sulfur dioxide and hydrogen chloride, producing ash. Located next to the lime silo, a carbon silo feeds carbon into the scrubber, eliminating mercury. A “baghouse filter” removes more ash. Exhaust enters a stack where it is ultimately released into the air.
The whole process is monitored from a command room inside the building: computer monitors show emissions levels and live video footage of the waste at various phases.
The DCRRA is a relatively small waste-to-energy plant (WTE) that only has the capacity, at present, to process about half of the county’s garbage. What happens to the other half of all trash produced by county residents? It goes to landfills.
Carting companies that pick up the trash make the decision (generally based on cost) where to take it – whether to a landfill or the local WTE. But it hasn’t always worked that way. When the plant first opened in the 1980s, “flow control” regulations allowed local governments to mandate where carters took garbage. A decision that banned the practice of flow control in 1994 was reversed this year in a U.S. Supreme Court decision, according to Calogero, who believes flow control could see a comeback in the county in the years ahead.
Currently, carting companies decide where to take trash in the free market. Not surprisingly, many of them “are only interested in cost,” said Calogero.
Landfills in the area are generally less expensive than the waste-to-energy plant. The rate per ton a facility charges to accept garbage is known as the “tipping fee” –DCRRA’s tipping fee is $80 per ton. Some landfills in the region charge $50 per ton. But the cost of fuel to haul the truckloads of garbage across the state also factors in.
DCRRA’s facility does not have the capacity to handle all of the refuse produced in the county. There are economies of scale in waste management, and the county’s WTE is small compared to some: in Florida, combination incineration plants and landfills, where the ash is deposited, are built side-by-side on 700 acres. Tipping fees at such vast facilities can run as low as $30 per ton.
The agency contracts with Montenay, a division of Paris-based Veolia Environmental Services Waste-to-Energy Division, to run the facility. The agency’s agreement guarantees Montenay, which employs 46 workers at the plant, 140,000 tons of trash to process each year.
