Moving to Garbage Power

The use of trash as fuel is spreading fast

Garbage can be golden," gushes New York City Sanitation Commissioner Anthony Vaccarello. "Garbage is the sow's ear that can be turned into a silk purse," adds Michael Dingman, president of Wheelabrator-Frye, a maker of environmental-control equipment. Such glowing descriptions of refuse, which is more conventionally considered a smelly, unsightly and unwanted byproduct of urban life, underscore the increasing popularity of trash as fuel in a U.S. facing growing shortages of energy.

The idea seems to have caught on almost overnight. In 1973, before the Arab oil embargo shook the Western economies, there were only two small "resource recovery" plants in the U.S. processing garbage into energy. Today 16 full-fledged plants are in operation using varied technologies, another twelve are under construction, and many more are in different stages of planning. The latest and largest municipality to join the switch to garbage power is New York City, which in December announced that it was negotiating with Manhattan-based Ashmont Systems to build a plant on the grounds of the former Brooklyn Navy Yard. The facility would take in 2,400 tons of garbage a day and supply heat and electricity for nearby industrial users. Earlier the city began talks with another firm, Combustion Equipment Associates, Inc. (CEA), to construct in a different part of Brooklyn a similar plant that would use 3,000 tons of city garbage a day.

Chicago already has a municipally owned waste-processing plant with the capacity to transform an average of 700 tons of trash a day into pellets that are the energy equivalent of 120,000 tons of coal a year; it sells them to Commonwealth Edison Co. In Saugus, Mass., a Swiss-developed technique used by New Hampshire-based Wheelabrator-Frye converts and burns 1,200 tons of garbage daily, producing the steam equivalent of 12 million to 17 million gals, of oil a year for a nearby General Electric plant. A Milwaukee plant is designed to devour 1,600 tons of garbage a day and feed the byproduct fuel to the Wisconsin Electric Power Co.

As prospects brighten for making big money out of muck, a whole new industry has sprung up. Some firms, such as Wheelabrator-Frye. Grumman Corp. and UOP Inc., have been using technologies that basically consist of burning the trash in specially constructed heavy-duty incinerators to produce steam for electricity and heating. Other companies, including American Can, Raytheon, CEA and Occidental Petroleum, are experimenting with more complex systems that would produce synthetic fuels.

One of the more advanced systems is a CEA process for converting garbage into a fine brown powder called Eco-Fuel II. Metals and other heavy materials are mechanically culled from the garbage (just about anything that is thrown away) before the remaining material, mostly cellulose, is treated with chemicals, then pulverized. That technique permits the fuel to be stored without decomposing. The powder can be burned more efficiently than raw garbage and can be used with oil, coal or natural gas. For example, a CEA plant in East Bridgewater. Mass., converts 1,200 tons of garbage a day into Eco-Fuel II, which is shipped 160 miles to Waterbury, Conn., where it is burned with oil to generate steam in a power plant.

Eco-Fuel II will sell for about the same price as coal or natural gas, which is well below the going rate for imported oil. Says CEA President Robert Beningson: "The market for resource recovery is almost limitless." Beningson, a man who thinks big, estimates that if all the garbage in the country were converted to powdered fuel, it would add the equivalent of 2 million bbl. a day to the nation's oil supplies, or about the same amount as the oil that will flow through the Alaska pipeline at peak capacity.

But technology does not always keep pace with ambition. Monsanto, after successfully experimenting with a small-scale advanced system that burned solid waste with very little oxygen to produce synthetic oil or gas, set up a recovery plant in Baltimore. Under the larger-scale operating conditions, snarls developed in the conveyor belt that fed trash into the kiln. That, among other technical problems, led Monsanto to give up, but the city of Baltimore continues to work on the plant, hoping to make it succeed. The cost of building garbage-processing plants is high too; Raytheon is spending $50 million to put up one in Monroe County, N. Y.

An even greater problem is the hostility of residents living near sites proposed for garbage-processing plants and storage areas. CEA's plant in East Bridgewater is presently shut down for repairs of damage caused by an explosion in November. Company officials speculate that the blast could have been the work of people wanting to stop shipments of raw garbage into the neighborhood. Says New York's Vaccarello: "We have the processes to clean up waste matter, but it will take time to clean up garbage's bad image."

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