Whether they are newly elected or have been re-elected as incumbents, state and local officials all over the country will be facing tough, important decisions about waste disposal in 2021. Meanwhile, the waste incineration industry doesn’t care much about who won in 2020 – they will continue making outrageous claims, targeting the decisions of both Republicans and Democrats, that dangerously cloud this already difficult decision-making process by hiding the significant environmental, health and economic downsides of burning garbage.
Trash incineration, which has been rebranded by the waste incineration industry as “waste-to-energy” (WTE), is often offered as an efficient solution to waste crises. But the truth is that this method of waste disposal is not only inefficient, it is harmful in every way that you might imagine, starting with the fact that it instantaneously spews virtually all carbon in our garbage into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, whether in the form of plastic, wood and paper, or lawn clippings and food scraps. In fact, burning garbage emits 1.5 times as much carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour generated as coal and three times as much as natural gas.
In contrast: recycling, composting, landfilling store carbon
In contrast, the main methods for managing garbage today – recycling, composting and landfilling – store large portions of carbon for many years. Any carbon they do release, even as methane, is emitted slowly over decades. For example, 100% of fossil carbon in plastic wastes is permanently stored in a landfill. More than 80% of biogenic carbon from wood and many types of paper is stored for decades in a landfill. Up to 20% of carbon in food scraps is even stored long term in a landfill. Moreover, modern landfills which capture and burn methane for electricity release less carbon than incinerating the solid waste that generates methane. All of this means communities that combine modern landfills with composting organics and recycling do far less environmental harm than WTE facilities.
The direct impact on health of burning trash is even more troubling. Recent research on the human-health impacts of particulate emissions calculates that their costs in human morbidity and mortality due to asthmas, cardiovascular diseases and lung cancers are between $550,000 and $664,000 per metric ton of fine particulate emissions. Particulate impacts on human health from WTE are more than double their impacts from landfills, and even worse when compared with recycling and composting.
The same is true for emissions of toxic pollutants. Incinerator toxic pollution costs are double those for landfills, and even higher multiples for recycling and composting.
Access to subsidies
In spite of these facts, some states, including Minnesota, consider burning trash as a renewable energy source. This gives incinerators access to taxpayer subsidies, which otherwise could fund clean sources of power like wind and solar rather than contribute to the profitability of this polluting industry.
Adding insult to injury, the health, environmental and economic costs of WTE facilities fall predominantly on the low-income communities and communities of color where most of these plants are located. In fact, nearly 80% of trash incinerators are located in environmental justice communities.
[image_caption]Jeffrey Morris[/image_caption]
The cost of producing electricity at a WTE facility is between 12 and 17 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) compared with 5 to 7 cents per kWh for the electricity generated by landfill-collected methane. WTE capital costs per kWh are in the same range as advanced nuclear and more than double the capital costs for onshore wind or fixed solar photovoltaic. WTE fixed operations and maintenance costs per kWh also are 6 times higher than landfill collected methane.
Incineration is inefficient
The bottom line on these cost issues: trash incineration is inefficient. It converts less than 25% of material energy in garbage into marketed electricity, compared with 35% efficiency for coal power and 45% for natural gas power. Even landfill methane burns with about 35% efficiency.
Burning trash also removes valuable materials from the economy. Once they are burned, they are gone – and it takes money and energy to create new ones. In contrast, packaging materials in garbage can be collected for recycling into new packaging products, thereby reducing the need for raw material and energy extraction from ecosystems. This conserves three to five times more energy than that generated by WTE burning of those materials.
Trash incineration is the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing. The industry markets itself as a clean, efficient and safe option – but in reality it is the most dirty, uneconomical and dangerous choice a community can make about their waste disposal. This is every bit as true after a big election as it was before.
Jeffrey Morris is a Ph.D. economist with a 45-year career focused on municipal solid waste management. He is also president of Sound Resource Management Group, Inc.
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How about talking about the downsides of landfills? Contamination of ground water, etc… Do you want a landfill in your back yard? How big are these landfills going to get in 100 years???
This is setting up a false argument. It’s not one or the other. No informed person argues for either indiscriminate dumping nor burning as baseline solutions for managing discards. But Minnesota, sadly, has become a center of infection for the incineration industry.
Au contraire, Mr. Muller, the article’s author seems to very clearly advocate cessation of ALL incineration.
I know Jeff Morris and he’s a very credible expert. Of course he’s advocating to stop garbage incineration, but that doesn’t mean he’s advocating more landfilling. It’s not one or the other.
Amen, Mr. Schumann. Thank you.
In the early 1990’s, Minnesota counties were struggling with the challenge of finding a responsible process for the ultimate disposition of solid waste. Several counties established composting facilities and required that the solid waste generated in their jurisdictions be delivered to the composting site. Because of litigation over the reach of the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, these “Flow Control” requirements were being challenged. In 1994 the US Supreme Court in the case of Carbone v. Clarkstown struck down the Flow Control regulation at issue in that litigation. This drove a knife in the heart of local government and Congressional efforts to deal with the situation. I was painfully aware of the solid-waste problem because as a new member of Congress in 1993, I was attempting to gather support for a federal law that would authorize Flow Control to composting and recycling facilities. In the beginning, counties in my Congressional District urged that I take up this effort as a no-brainer, win-win situation. I would be a true hero. I soon learned that the Flow Control question divided Congress and major lobbying/campaign-contribution groups into conflicting camps that undermined any realistic prospect of legislative success. With numerous crisis issues on my plate, a small staff, and minimal support, I put my efforts to enact this legislation favoring composting facilities and recycling on hold to focus on other problems. For me, this experience was an early lesson in the tenacity and good luck needed to enact common sense solutions to seemingly simple problems. Ironically, in 2007, six years after I left Congress, a new Supreme Court decision in the United Haulers case, freed up local units of government to use Flow Control to require that solid waste go to responsible destinations. But sadly, the counties with the most responsible, visionary initiatives had been badly burned and were reluctant to re-establish their programs. They too had moved on. Today we face the same problem. Thanks for your article.
There’s interesting history there, Mr. Minge, and a mini-lesson on the vicissitudes of legislating – but all of those words leave me puzzled as to whether you support, or oppose, WTE generation and/or district heating.
Current case law as I understand it allows “flow control” to “publicly owned” facilities. (United Haulers Association v. Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Management Authority, 550 U.S. 330, 344 (2007))
Waste management in Minnesota is a mess, due largely to the toxic influence of the incineration industry, which has its hooks into Minnesota on many levels, sadly including some “environmental” NGOs and very much including the “Pollution Control Agency.” I gave some detail on the latter here, a few years ago: https://alanmuller.com/garbage-in-the-minnesota-legislature/
I agree with Mike. Surely, this PhD expert on garbage can’t be recommending landfills!!
I’m not convinced that burning rubbish is all that bad given that the alternatives are not much better. We’re going to be burning coal, natural gas or using nuclear power for energy for some time yet. We’re nowhere near using garbage as much as coal.
I’m recently learning that curbside recycling promoted by most communities in Minnesota is also wasteful and inefficient. The only really good alternatives are “reducing and reusing” which the advertising and marketing industry seems deeply opposed to allowing. Plus, it’s apparently against a lot of health regulations to bring your own containers for food to avoid the totally wasteful overpackaging of most grocery and household items.
I don’t believe that the author has properly considered the impact of recycling. He states “Burning trash also removes valuable materials from the economy. Once they are burned, they are gone – and it takes money and energy to create new ones. In contrast, packaging materials in garbage can be collected for recycling into new packaging products, thereby reducing the need for raw material and energy extraction from ecosystems.” Does the author not participate in his local recycling programs? Packaging materials that can be economically recycled into new packaging products (as wells as lawn furniture and such) ARE recycled. Washington County is experiencing the opposite problem with residents’ “wish-cycling”, putting items into recycling bins that they HOPE can be recycled, but that cannot be recycled.
Does the author even realize that the Minneapolis HERC doesn’t generate electricity? It makes steam. Not addressed whatsoever.
Wrong. The HERC garbage burner has a rated electrical output of 37.5 mw. There may also be some steam used for heating, but the main output is electrical.
Dr. Morris’ column doesn’t point to any specific proposals to expand WTE in Minnesota or the U.S. Are there any on the way that we should be aware of? Is the WTE industry preparing a legislative push somewhere? I would be interested to know.
In Minnesota, the Elk River refuse-derived fuel (RDF) plant that shredded garbage up to prepare for incineration shut down several years ago, right? Ramsey and Washington Counties are about to convert the RDF plant in Newport to a mixed-waste processing facility to extract additional recyclables not caught at the curb, and to pull out food waste and other compostables using compostable bags to be distributed to county residents. So the closure or potential conversion of these 30+ year old plants means something like 700,000 or 800,000 tons of garbage won’t be incinerated annually that were before. We still have quite a few WTE facilities in Greater MN and the big HERC plant in Minneapolis, obviously.
Recycling is big business–commodity prices have their ups and downs, but we have something like 9,000 manufacturing jobs in the state that rely on a steady stream of our recyclables to make new products. “Natural HDPE” plastic (#2 bottles that aren’t pigmented) is selling at a higher price than aluminum cans right now! Recycling facilities increasing use more high tech, including robots and infrared scanning.
The need is to shut down the existing garbage burners as soon as possible.