| By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
HORSHOLM, Denmark — The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant
enclave here are at peace with the hulking neighbor just over the back
fence: a vast energy plant that burns thousands of tons of household garbage
and industrial waste, round the clock.
Far cleaner than conventional incinerators,
this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity.
Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would
have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago.
In that time, such plants have become both
the mainstay of garbage disposal and a crucial fuel source across Denmark,
from wealthy exurbs like Horsholm to Copenhagen's downtown area. Their
use has not only reduced the country's energy costs and reliance on oil
and gas, but also benefited the environment, diminishing the use of landfills
and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. The plants run so cleanly that many
times more dioxin is now released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues
than from incineration.
With all these innovations, Denmark now regards
garbage as a clean alternative fuel rather than a smelly, unsightly problem.
And the incinerators, known as waste-to-energy plants, have acquired considerable
cachet as communities like Horsholm vie to have them built.
Denmark now has 29 such plants, serving 98
municipalities in a country of 5.5 million people, and 10 more are planned
or under construction. Across Europe, there are about 400 plants, with
Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands leading the pack in expanding them
and building new ones.
By contrast, no new waste-to-energy plants
are being planned or built in the United States, the Environmental Protection
Agency says — even though the federal government and 24 states now classify
waste that is burned this way for energy as a renewable fuel, in many cases
eligible for subsidies. There are only 87 trash-burning power plants in
the United States, a country of more than 300 million people, and almost
all were built at least 15 years ago.
Instead, distant landfills remain the end
point for most of the nation's trash. New York City alone sends 10,500
tons of residential waste each day to landfills in places like Ohio and
South Carolina.
"Europe has gotten out ahead with this
newest technology," said Ian A. Bowles, a former Clinton administration
official who is now the Massachusetts state secretary of energy.
Still, Mr. Bowles said that as America's current
landfills topped out and pressure to reduce heat-trapping gases grew, Massachusetts
and some other states were "actively considering" new waste-to-energy
proposals; several existing plants are being expanded. He said he expected
resistance all the same in a place where even a wind turbine sets off protests.
Why Americans Are Reluctant
Matt Hale, director of the Office of Resource
Conservation and Recovery of the United States Environmental Protection
Agency, said the reasons that waste-to-energy plants had not caught on
nationally were the relative abundance of cheap landfills in a large country,
opposition from state officials who feared the plants could undercut recycling
programs and a "negative public perception." In the United States,
individual states and municipalities generally decide what method to use
to get rid of their waste.
Still, a 2009 study by the E.P.A. and North
Carolina State University scientists came down strongly in favor of waste-to-energy
plants over landfills as the most environmentally friendly destination
for urban waste that cannot be recycled. Embracing the technology would
not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions and local pollution, but also
yield copious electricity, it said.
Yet powerful environmental groups have fought
the concept passionately. “Incinerators are really the devil,” said Laura
Haight, a senior environmental associate with the New York Public Interest
Research Group.
Investing in garbage as a green resource is
simply perverse when governments should be mandating recycling, she said.
"Once you build a waste-to-energy plant, you then have to feed it. Our
priority is pushing for zero waste."
The group has vigorously opposed building
a plant in New York City.
Even Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has championed
green initiatives and ranked Copenhagen's waste-fueled heating on his list
of environmental "best practices," has shied away from proposing
to get one built.
"It is not currently being pursued — not
because of the technology, which has advanced, but because of the issue
in selecting sites to build incinerators," said Jason Post, the mayor's
deputy press secretary on environmental issues. "It's a Nimby issue.
It would take years of hearings and reviews."
Nickolas J. Themelis, a professor of engineering
at Columbia University and a waste-to-energy proponent, said America's
resistance to constructing the new plants was economically and environmentally
"irresponsible."
"It's so irrational; I've almost given
up with New York," he said. "It's like you're in a village of Hottentots
who look up and see an airplane — when everybody else is using airplanes
— and they say, ‘No, we won't do it, it's too scary.'"
Acceptance in Denmark
Attitudes could hardly be more different in
Denmark, where plants are placed in the communities they serve, no matter
how affluent, so that the heat of burning garbage can be efficiently piped
into homes.
Planners take pains to separate residential
traffic from trucks delivering garbage, and some of the newest plants are
encased in elaborate outer shells that resemble sculptures.
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suite:
"New buyers are usually O.K. with the plant,"
said Hans Rast, president of the homeowners' association in Horsholm, who
cut a distinguished figure in corduroy slacks and a V-neck sweater as he
poured coffee in a living room of white couches and Oriental rugs.
"What they like is that they look out and
see the forest," he said. (The living rooms in this enclave of town
houses face fields and trees, while the plant is roughly some 400 yards
over a back fence that borders the homes' carports). The lower heating
costs don't hurt, either. Eighty percent of Horsholm's heat and 20% of
its electricity come from burning trash.
Many countries that are expanding waste-to-energy
capacity, like Denmark and Germany, typically also have the highest recycling
rates; only the material that cannot be recycled is burned.
Waste-to-energy plants do involve large upfront
expenditures, and tight credit can be a big deterrent. Harrisburg, Pa.,
has been flirting with bankruptcy because of a $300 million loan it took
to reopen and refit an old public incinerator with the new technology.
But hauling trash is expensive, too. New York
City paid $307 million last year to export more than four million tons
of waste, mostly to landfills in distant states, Mr. Post said. Although
the city is trying to move more of its trash by train or barge, much of
it travels by truck, with heavy fuel emissions.
In 2009, a small
portion of the city's trash was processed at two 1990-vintage waste-to-energy
plants in Newark and Hempstead, N.Y., owned by a private company, Covanta.
The city pays $65 a ton for the service — the cheapest available way for
New York City to get rid of its trash. Sending garbage to landfills is
more expensive: the city's costliest current method is to haul waste by
rail to a landfill in Virginia.
While new, state-of-the-art landfills do collect
the methane that emanates from rotting garbage to make electricity, they
churn out roughly twice as much climate-warming gas as waste-to-energy
plants do for the units of power they produce, the 2009 E.P.A. study found.
Methane, the primary warming gas emitted by landfills, is about 20 times
more potent than carbon dioxide, the gas released by burning garbage.
The study also concluded that waste-to-energy
plants produced lower levels of pollutants than the best landfills did,
but nine times the energy. Although new landfills are lined to prevent
leaks of toxic substances and often capture methane, the process is highly
inefficient, it noted.
Laws Spur New Technology
In Europe, environmental laws have hastened
the development of waste-to-energy programs. The European Union severely
restricts the creation of new landfill sites, and its nations already have
binding commitments to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 2012 under
the international pact known as the Kyoto Protocol, which was never ratified
by the United States.
Garbage cannot easily be placed out of sight,
out of mind in Europe's smaller, densely populated countries, as it so
often is in the United States. Many of the 87 waste-to-energy plants in
the United States are in densely populated areas like Long Island and Cape
Cod.
While these plants are generally two decades
old, many have been progressively retrofitted with new pollution filters,
though few produce both heat and power like the newest Danish versions.
In Horsholm only 4% of waste now goes to landfills,
and 1 percent (chemicals, paints and some electronic equipment) is consigned
to "special disposal" in places like secure storage vaults in an
abandoned salt mine in Germany. Sixty-one percent of the town's waste is
recycled and 34% is incinerated at waste-to-energy plants.
From a pollution perspective, today's energy-generating
incinerators have little in common with the smoke-belching models of the
past. They have arrays of newly developed filters and scrubbers to capture
the offending chemicals — hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides,
dioxins, furans and heavy metals — as well as small particulates.
Emissions from the plants in all categories
have been reduced to just 10 to 20% of levels allowed under the European
Union's strict environmental standards for air and water discharges.
At the end of the incineration process, the
extracted acids, heavy metals and gypsum are sold for use in manufacturing
or construction. Small amounts of highly concentrated toxic substances,
forming a paste, are shipped to one of two warehouses for highly hazardous
materials, in the Norwegian fjords and in a used salt mine in Germany.
"The hazardous elements are concentrated
and handled with care rather than dispersed as they would be in a landfill,"
said Ivar Green-Paulsen, general manager of the Vestforbraending plant
in Copenhagen, the country's largest.
In Denmark, local governments run trash collection
as well as the incinerators and recycling centers, and laws and financial
incentives ensure that recyclable materials are not burned. (In the United
States most waste-to-energy plants are private ventures.) Communities may
drop recyclable waste at recycling centers free of charge, but must pay
to have garbage incinerated.
At Vestforbraending, trucks stop on scales
for weighing and payment before dumping their contents. The trash is randomly
searched for recyclable material, with heavy fines for offenders.
The homeowners' association in Horsholm has
raised what its president, Mr. Rast, called “minor issues” with the plant,
like a bright light on the chimney that shone into some bedrooms, and occasional
truck noise. But mostly, he said, it is a respected silent neighbor, producing
no noticeable odors.
The plant, owned by five adjacent communities,
has even proved popular in a conservative region with Denmark's highest
per-capita income. Morten Slotved, 40, Horsholm's mayor, is trying to expand
it. "Constituents like it because it decreases heating costs and raises
home values," he said with a smile. "I'd like another furnace." |
