by Jacoba Charles
OriginsIn the large backyard of a gray, two-story house with purple shutters, bright orange fish swim languidly beneath an electric pond heater. Nearby stands a plastic swing set, primary colors paling with time. There is a pile of flowerpots, and a cluster of tall plastic cans near the corner of the garage. On a cold, damp morning, their upturned lids fill with ice, and whoever takes out the garbage has to bang them hard against the fence before they fit back where they belong.
But this isn’t a story about people, or swingsets, or fish. It’s a story about energy, and how we make it. It’s a story about the basics, and why they aren’t as simple as they might seem. Mostly, it’s a story about garbage and electricity and how the one turns into the other; and it begins and ends with a house.
Beginning at this house, with its goldfish and flowerpots and purple shutters, is an accident of chance. A very similar story could begin at any of the nearly 6,000 homes in the four square miles of the industrial city of Rahway, located in Union County New Jersey. It could even begin in any of the 87 other cities in the United States that also make their power, in part, by burning their garbage.
At 10:05 on a Sunday morning in February, the woman who lives in the house with the purple shutters threw away a Styrofoam tray that recently held a pound of ground turkey. The turkey went into her chili, and the package into the kitchen garbage can. Her name is Audrey Angrisoni, and she was born and raised in New Jersey. For the last 16 years she, her husband and their growing family have owned this tall house beside the busy traffic of Madison Hill Road.
Angrisoni, 44, cooks early and in batches – as a full-time mom operating her own business, she doesn’t have time to make a meal every night. The turkey chili she made early that Sunday became lunches and snacks for the next several days, while the small white container that held the turkey was forgotten almost immediately: cleared off the kitchen counter into the knee-high white can behind white-slatted closet doors in the corner. The tray nestled in among crumpled paper towels, a milk carton, an empty package of Doritos, and other garbage that had accumulated since Thursday night. At 11:15 that same morning, Angrisoni took the almost-full white plastic bag from the closet and dropped it in the gray can standing outside with the recycling and yard waste cans. Only that one bag was taken out of the house that weekend, and when she left at 6 p.m. to drive her daughter to a study group at church, Angrisoni dragged the nearly empty plastic can to the top of her driveway.
On the MoveAt 9:53 on a cold, hazy morning, the trash Angrisoni had set out the night before was tossed into the dirty white garbage truck #10 by Fernando Munoz. Munoz is a slight man, dressed in brown and trimmed in black: brown sweatshirt, brown denim workpants, black ski cap and work boots and thick dirty gloves. Over this, a fluorescent green safety vest. He tosses bags and empties cans with unhurried, fluid ease as the beetle-like truck beside him creeps forward, compacting its load every house or two. When the piles are large or close together, his partner Bill Dickson gets out of the cab and slings garbage too.
Over the course of a year, the garbagemen of Rahway collect roughly 14,000 tons of trash: the weight of 2,000 elephants, half the weight of the trash that New York City produces in a single day. The men who move the garbage get up for work around four in the morning, and they are out in the trucks from 6 a.m until noon, four days a week. On Wednesdays, they collect recycling instead. “Everybody thinks it’s just picking up a can and throwing it in,” Dickson said of his work. “But they do it a little while and they get disgusted. You’ve got to deal with bottles of urine, cat crap, dog crap, in the summer you’ve got maggots. It’s not peaches and cream.”
As he turned the crank on the side of the truck, and the metal wedge descended to grind the Angrisoni’s single bag into the 9.6 tons of other people’s waste, a sick-smelling pale juice dribbled down the metal. “Yeah,” Munoz agreed, “it’s pretty gross.” Another area of the truck, near the bumper, bled a brilliantly raspberry-colored liquid, still containing seeds, onto the pavement.
Twenty minutes after the Angrisoni’s trash became irrevocably anonymous amid all the other anonymous garbage, truck #10 was ready to be emptied. On typical winter days, a truck may only fill up once; on heavy days, in summers or after a holiday, it may be emptied two or even three times. In Rahway, there is no landfill or transfer station. All household waste is collected by Dickson, Munoz, and their 16 co-workers and taken straight to the Union County Resource Recovery Facility, also known as a waste-to-energy power plant.
At 10:40 a.m., less than an hour after the garbage was picked up, Dickson arrived at the power plant scalehouse, where every truck is weighed in, and then drove into the cavernous warehouse located in the belly of the plant. There, a mile and a quarter from where the beetle-truck collected the Angrisoni’s paper plates, orange peels, and turkey carton, the garbage was deposited. During the busiest time of day, as many as six trucks may be in the warehouse, which is known as the tipping bay. On that particular morning, though, truck #10 was alone in the vast building that looks like an airplane hangar and smells like a landfill. Mothers who bring their children from the other side of town to the nearby Madden ball field are a little surprised that the stink doesn’t spread beyond the warehouse. Inside the facility, the garbage-laden air is used to fuel the incinerators, so it can’t escape into the community. All day and every day, fresh air streams in, replacing the tainted air that feeds the fires.
The odor in the warehouse emanates from the trucks, from the slime-covered ground, and – most of all – from a garbage collection pit 40 feet deep, 40 feet wide and 300 feet long, that stretches from one end of the warehouse to the other. When truck #10 arrived, the pit was well beyond full, as it is on most days. The trash rose up in mountains, the tallest of which towered some 30 feet into the air. Two six-clawed overhead cranes, like props from a science fiction movie, constantly bit eight-ton chunks out of the pile: moving it, mixing it, and lifting it to the furnace.
Though the roof over the dumping floor is low, about 25 feet high, the ceiling is four times higher over the pit, where the cranes swoop and reel from shadowy, orange-lit rafters. Above the garbage, behind the cranes, a grate-covered wall can be seen sucking air into the furnaces. Engorged trucks – medium-sized ones like Dickson’s, or larger 20-ton trucks from transfer stations in other cities – back right up to the pit, then drive slowly away as they dump, spreading their contents across the slick cement floor. A long trail of trash unwinds behind them, abandoned offerings left at the feet of a trash-mountain shrine.
Half the donations that come to this particular fiery altar are from 19 local cities, townships and boroughs in Union County. The other half are trucked in over bridges and turnpikes from New York City, less than an hour away. The trash flows in almost ceaselessly along an arterial system of highways and turnpikes and city streets, pumped out of homes and businesses and collected at the incinerator. At this final resting place, 4,200 tons of garbage are gathered and left on the muck-covered cement floor of the tipping bay every weekday. Roughly 520,000 tons are burned in the power plant each year – the equivalent of stuffing 11 ships the size of the Titanic in your fireplace.
Garbage is burning all across America: the weight of 600 Titanics, in trash, is incinerated each year in 88 waste-to-energy plants. Though this is a massive amount of garbage, it is only 8 percent of what we throw away each year, and incineration generates less than 1 percent of our electricity. Current waste-to-energy technology could provide up to 3 percent of America’s electricity and replace the equivalent of 300 million barrels of oil if all non-recycled garbage was burned. But burning is an expensive and unpopular option in this country. In other countries, more than 200 new waste-to-energy plants have been built in the last decade, bringing the global total to 600 and rising. Europe alone is home to 400 of those, and Japan incinerates 74 percent of its trash. The incineration process found at Union County, called “mass burn,” is the most common and extracts between 20 and 30 percent of the energy generated by the furnaces. More efficient plants capture 50 percent of that energy, and foreseeable technology – what one expert calls the “elegant future of waste-to-energy” – will transform garbage into a homogenous fuel comparable to natural gas, which would be even more versatile and efficient.
In the United States, incineration is most common in urban areas that have less space for landfills. The Northeast sends the largest portion of its garbage – about 20 percent – to the furnaces. Nationwide, however, the industry is in decline. Efforts to get new plants built inevitably run into community opposition as well as economic hurdles; the image of the toxin-spewing incinerators of the 1980s has been hard to shake. Locals worry about pollutants and odor and increased truck traffic on already busy roads. Some groups oppose the waste-to-energy process out of concern that it will discourage recycling by making garbage disposal appear less wasteful. However, no study has been done that supports such concerns, whereas several studies have found that states with more waste-to-energy plants like Michigan and Maine also have higher rates of recycling, up to 20 percent above the national average.
Before Dickson drove truck #10 back out into the cold sunshine, he got out of the cab, finished his coffee, and tossed the white paper cup into the garbage mountain – a single, personalized donation. While he took a moment to knock straggling bits of trash from the frame of his truck, a janitor who cleans the plant’s offices emerged from one of the interior doors and tossed his own token, a shiny black bag, onto the pile.
The BardoDirty yellow front-end loaders work like busy insects among the long trails of garbage disgorged by each truck. The trucks spread the trash out thinly enough so that men driving the loaders can scan the piles for non-burnable materials: a toxic pile of paint cans, chunks of concrete, a refrigerator. They pull out whatever they need to, sending it to a landfill or to be recycled. A row of dumpsters along one wall waits to receive electronics, appliances, and large metal objects. The operators don’t sweat the small stuff – the system is designed to accommodate some undesirable materials slipping through. No fine-scale sorting is done after the garbage leaves homes and businesses to come to the plant; by the time it gets to the tipping floor everything that can’t easily be seen is going to be burned.
If the Angrisoni’s garbage bag had been fluorescent pink, maybe it would have reappeared for a minute as the loader operator examined the contents of truck #10. Once a local woman found her engagement ring by looking through the bags spread out on the tipping floor; she was lucky and stubborn and she and her fiancée searched for hours. Garbage bags, in their two-tone spectrum of black and white, are as easy to tell apart as New York taxicabs from a window on the 86th floor. When each pile of garbage on the floor is approved as burnable, the drivers push it into the pit to join other household trash bags and wilted lettuce and shattered lumber and wax-covered cardboard produce boxes and nearly every other sort of detritus the mind can dream up.
Dealing with our trash is a steadily growing problem. Of all the countries in the world, the United States throws away the most stuff – almost 390 tons each year. China produces almost as much garbage as we do, but has a population that is over four times as large. Despite recycling rates of about 28 percent, the average American still creates one ton of solid waste every year that must either be burned or entombed in a landfill. Garbage burial grounds gobble up green spaces, threatening groundwater with toxic ooze while emitting methane, the most potent greenhouse gas. Transportation of trash to landfills is also an increasing problem, particularly in those parts of America with more people in less space, or with stricter regulations against landfill placement, such as the Northeast and California respectively. Many of these areas ship their garbage by truck, train or barge to other states, adding to the pollution that waste disposal causes. Most of the trash from New York City is shipped as many as 370 miles to landfills in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
At the Union County plant, trash arrives in heterogeneous, uneven loads. There is wet garbage and dry garbage, trucks full of vegetables and trucks full of drywall. Commercial waste is more likely to be dominated by a certain genre of trash: leftovers from a grocery store, paper scraps from an office. Household garbage is fine-grained, more mixed. The job of the big, busy cranes is to manage whatever the trucks bring in by moving it from one pile to the next – keeping it in the pit long enough to dry out and blend together, so that the fuel burns as consistently as it can.
No one will ever know how long it took for the Angrisoni’s Styrofoam turkey tray to disappear into the furnace, but Jim Helfer, business manager of Covanta Energy, the company that operates the facility, says it was probably three days, though its stay might have been much shorter. The crane operators have a system, organizing the garbage mounds so that each truckload of garbage is burned within no more than three days. But some things get burned too soon; scraps fall out from between the teeth of the enormous cranes; no sorting process is perfect.
What is known is that at some point the crane scooped up that one little man-made scrap of reconfigured fossil fuel – for Styrofoam is manufactured from petroleum – and didn’t toss it back into the sea of garbage. Instead, it was raised into the rafters with eight tons of other detritus, and carried into an interior bay tucked 50 feet up in the gut of the power plant, where it was dropped into one of three enormous funnels that each feeds one of the power plant’s three furnaces.
Each crane-load joins a compacted column of garbage that completely fills the funnel, slowly slipping downward. At the bottom, the trash, or fuel, is rhythmically stuffed into the furnace by a hydraulic ram at the base of the funnel’s spout. The column of garbage doubles as a cork – since it blocks all oxygen, no flames escape upward when the furnace is stoked with a fresh supply of trash. The ram works in concert with a door that flaps open into the furnace. When it reached that point, about 20 minutes after being lifted from the pit, things became very different very quickly for our piece of garbage.
Earth, Air, and FireInside each 1,700-degree incinerator a yellow-orange inferno rages, fueled by 500 tons of garbage a day and fanned by air sucked in from the tipping bay. The door, where the trash makes its grand rammed-in entrance from the funnel, is at the top of a floor that slopes downward like a broad playground slide. Instead of being slide-smooth, which would let the garbage tumble to the bottom without burning completely, the floor is a ridged conveyor belt that constantly moves against gravity like an “up” escalator. This keeps half-burnt trash mixed in with the newly arrived load at the top, where the fire burns the hottest. A piece of paper or plastic would combust almost instantly; a phone book or the leg of a chair might take 15 minutes; a large tree stump might emerge from the incinerator before being entirely consumed. The escalator is designed for large, or wet, slow-burning objects: logs, bicycles, watermelons.
Visitors and technicians can look through a tempered-glass window into each of the furnaces, and watch garbage vaporize. Spurts of pale orange flame burst out of a moonscape of fire and ash that slopes upward, away from the window; at the top of the slope, where the fresh garbage arrives, there is a solid wall of fire. Toward the bottom, closer to the window, there is less fire and a few hard-to-burn items: a collection of coffee cans, a tangle of wire, and a piece of wood that looks like the trunk of a small tree jut out of a chunky landscape of ash.
Each tremendous fire is confined in a 20-foot square box, suspended along one wall of a building that makes the airplane-hanger-sized tipping warehouse look small. No view is unobstructed for more than ten feet, like an industrial version of a jungle. The cavernous interior of the six-story, cement-walled building is jumbled with catwalks and beams; cables, pipes and wires loop through space like lianas. Helmeted, blue-suited maintenance workers stalk up and down ladders; three mechanics are on duty in the plant at all times. The warm air smells chalky, like drying concrete, and there is a terrific clatter and hiss and hum. All the seeming chaos is carefully planned and continuously maintained, designed entirely to deal with the three byproducts of burning garbage: ash, toxic air, and heat.
Within a day or three of leaving Audrey Angrisoni’s kitchen, when the last of the chili had just been eaten, her Styrofoam tray met the furnace flame and was vaporized within seconds. The more tangible leftovers of the burning – the ash that was once a Doritos bag and the twisted frame of a bicycle, for example - tumbled into a quenching pool at the bottom of the slide after about 45 minutes in the fiery chamber. After being drenched in water for half an hour, they were spit out below the pool in a thick stream of what looks like chunky wet concrete, punctuated with pieces of metal. This gooey mess, which weighed 75 percent less than when it went in, was dropped onto a vibrating belt that runs below all three furnaces. The discards were carried right out a door at the far end of the plant, and onto a conveyor belt into another, smaller building. There, a magnetic drum separated any ferrous metal from the ash, and 15 minutes after leaving the furnace each material was sorted into a separate pile to be hauled away. Roughly 1,500 tons of garbage enter the furnaces each day, and 375 tons of burnt solid waste emerge. Twenty trucks per day come into the little building, hauling the leftovers either to a metal recycler in Newark or to Grows landfill in Pennsylvania, an hour-long drive from the plant.
Soil and ash from waste-to-energy plants are used to seal in the garbage contained in a landfill; sometimes the ash is buried inside, as well. Garbage that isn’t burned has a more direct path to its grave, but it takes up 90 percent more space and is much less inert when it gets there. The raw products of an incinerator, though highly toxic, are produced over a short period of time and in a confined space where they can be contained, controlled, and cleaned. Unburned garbage in a landfill can remain toxic for at least 100 years, a continuing threat to groundwater and atmosphere. Over time, the impermeable linings installed to keep leachate contained in the landfill can rupture. Less than 20 percent of landfills around the country attempt to capture methane, the greenhouse gas made by decomposing garbage; an estimated 123 pounds of methane are released per ton that is buried. For this reason alone, incinerators have a smaller effect on global warming. Instead of methane they emit 979 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton of garbage, which is a larger quantity by weight, but 23 times less potent. The annual carbon dioxide released from the incinerator is equivalent to only 42 pounds of methane. Because of environmental and land-use concerns, other first-world regions, such as Europe and Japan, incinerate over half of their garbage, and recycle much of the rest. America sends almost all of its trash to the landfill – largely because it’s cheaper.
A waste-to-energy plant like Union County’s would cost up to $200 million to build and operate. Customers also pay more to dump their garbage at an incinerator, often paying nearly $70 as opposed to $30 per ton; but the cost difference decreases for states like New York or California that also have to pay for transportation to landfills. The Union County plant was built in 1994 by the city of Rahway, when electrical companies were required to pay more for power generated by more environmentally friendly methods such as waste-to-energy. This let the incinerators charge less to dump their garbage, and thereby compete with landfills, which are cheaper to build and cheaper to operate. During that time, which was a heyday of waste-to-energy expansion, cities were also allowed to dictate where their garbage was sent – a policy called “flow control” that guaranteed a supply of trash but was objected to by the haulers. Both laws were reversed shortly after Rahway built its plant. The confluence of community opposition and a loss of economic incentives has led to a stalemate, in which experts agree that waste-to-energy is environmentally superior to landfilling, and yet no new facilities have been built in over ten years.
By the time the ash formerly known as the Angrisoni’s garbage was spit out of the incinerator, the pollution-laden air that it generated was headed in a different direction, wending its way out through the maze-like depths of the furnace. The convoluted design guides the air away from the flames while transferring as much heat as possible into the walls, which are made from water-filled steel pipes. The hot air gives its energy to the cooler water, turning it into steam. Eventually, when all extractable heat is removed, the air enters the pollution control devices.
Twenty years ago, incinerators were shamelessly toxic, spewing out far more carcinogenic dioxins, greenhouse gasses, and heavy metals than coal-fired power plants. Today, the 88 waste-to-energy facilities in the United States produce about eight grams of dioxins each year – a quantity that could be shaped into five pills and held in the palm of your hand. In 1987, 150 times as much of the cancer-causing, plastic-based particle was being produced by incinerators. The improvements have been similar with other emissions. Modern waste-to-energy plants emit five times less dioxin, four times less mercury and two times less fossil-fuel-based carbon dioxide than coal-fired plants. Overall, yearly emissions of a garbage-burning plant fall somewhere between those of a clean-burning natural gas plant and the more dirty (but still legal) coal; in 2003, EPA administrators described waste-to-energy as having “less environmental impact than almost any other source of electricity.”
In the Union County plant, pollutants are measured at 15-second intervals throughout the system by control-room operator Don Patton and his battalion of computer monitors. Sitting at a console that looks like an early TV-version of a spaceship, he can observe and tweak the inner chemistry from the furnace to the stack. Seven-foot tall computers flash figures across screens and LED displays. Gauges and dials hover and twitch. Patton or one of his blue-jumpsuited co-workers are on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to monitor the burn process, the air flow, or the pollution control chemistry in case something particularly nasty gets burned. Even so, the emissions that finally billow out of the stack fluctuate: there are bad minutes when toxins spike and good minutes when they fall, but the waste-to-energy plants reliably stay within thresholds established by federal clean air standards.
Even as the hot air passes through the maze of heat exchange contraptions in the furnace and boiler, it is bombarded with chemicals, such as carbon and ammonia, to neutralize some of the airborne toxins. By the time it leaves the boiler, or heat-collection area, the air has been stripped of most of its nitrogen oxides and mercury, two major pollutants. In a series of cylindrical structures that look like grain silos, acidic gasses are pulled out as the air is pumped into the bottom and forced upward through a lime slurry that bonds to the pollutants. From the silos, called “scrubbers,” the air is subjected to a final round of cleaning in another building called a baghouse. Filled with pipes whose walls are filter-fabric instead of metal, the air is strained of ash and lime dust and any other chunks of matter that might have clung to its momentum. This toxic dust is shaken into collection trays at the bottom, and diluted to non-hazardous levels by mixing with the furnace ash. Other waste-to-energy plants may keep it separate, and landfill it in a concrete cocoon.
By the time the air was flung into the atmosphere from a smokestack 12 stories above the Rahway River, it carried very little of the Angrisoni’s garbage that became flame less than 60 seconds before. The dioxins, nitrogen oxide and acid-forming gases that burning Styrofoam produces in abundance had been reduced to minimal levels, and only a vague heat-shimmer in the sky revealed that the stack was active at all.
GenesisIn the belly of the furnace, just minutes before leaving the stack, the creation of electricity began when the Styrofoam-warmed air parted with its heat. Every power plant needs the same first ingredient: force that can spin a wheel. It can be the force of wind or the force of water; most commonly, it is the force of steam. Hold a pinwheel over a teakettle spout, and watch the steam push a wheel. Coal, oil, natural gas, and garbage-fueled power plants are just big burners for a big stove, heating water.
Steam was first created in the furnace walls; as it expanded out of the narrow pipes in the incinerator, it was still a (comparatively) cool 550 degrees Fahrenheit and heavy with water droplets. The next part of the maze, called a “superheater,” changed all that. As the wet steam was exposed again to hot furnace air, it continued to gather momentum as the water droplets heated, expanded, and came apart, becoming a bone-dry gas packed with energy. It thundered from the far end of the superheater like an 835-degree freight train, racing across the boiler in a 20-inch pipe until it smashed with all its force into the blades of a turbine as big as a jet engine. The blades turned, and a shaft turned, and deep in the generator attached to the turbine, polar magnets spun inside a coiled nest of copper wire. Less than a split second later Audrey Angrisoni’s turkey tray had helped agitate electrons into a 13,800-volt stream of electricity.
From that moment of electrical inception, the process was close to instantaneous. The stream of power pouring out of the generator – which from the outside is an innocuously humming blue box, as tall as a man, standing in the center of a muted linoleum-tiled room, where one large window opens into the control room and another opens onto a pale patch of sky outside – is routed to a substation in a chilly, snow-dotted gravel yard only 90 feet away. There it gets ramped up to match the 26,000-volt commercial grid, which it connects to through a thick length of wire only as long as a medium-sized car. Inside that wire – hanging limp and black in the cold air, waiting for a bird to land – a superhighway of electrons rages.
When they hit the grid, the garbage-fueled electrons merge with those from nearby conventional power plants and become anonymous. Some stay behind and keep the plant itself running, but the rest stay on the turnpike of wires until they veer off, by an accident of physics and chance, to charge headlong into a lightbulb or a stereo or the burner on a stove. The home or office the electrons stumble into may have sent garbage to the incinerator; the electron chain may have been generated by their garbage, and it may not. But a contribution has been made; the Union County waste-to-energy plant could give 30,000 homes all the electricity they need if it didn’t share the grid; instead, it gives a much smaller portion of electricity to as many as 20 million separate households.
Burning the Angrisoni’s five-pound bag of garbage generated enough electricity to keep a 100-watt lightbulb burning bright for 15 hours. The four-ounce turkey tray would illuminate it for five. Back in Audrey’s kitchen, last week’s garbage helps power her electric stove, her alarm clock, her television. Outside in the back yard, the floating heater in her fishpond was fueled, for a blink of an eye, by dirty paper plates, chicken bones, and a single Styrofoam tray.
(This was originally written in 2007 as a Master's Thesis project for the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism)
Over 1,500 people came together at the Asilomar conference
center last week, just south of Monterey. Under pine trees and on white sand
beaches they met and talked about all things related to sustainable
agriculture. Lectures on subjects ranging from the Farm Bill to cover cropping were
packed with attentive crowds. At meals, novice farmers sat shoulder-to-shoulder
with seasoned producers. Business cards and advice flurried like a snowstorm.
