# Waste to Energy



## peakbagger (Dec 30, 2019)

MOD EDIT: comments moved to a new thread on Waste to Energy



Sodbuster said:


> Interesting that you say too cheap, so you want to artificially increase the price of oil which would be essentially be a regressive tax on the working poor. Their heat bills would rise as would their electric and gasoline costs, and the costs of anything made from plastic right down to carpeting. I think a solution that needs to be revisited is burning the combustible trash to generate electricity using advanced scrubbers to keep emissions to a bare minimum. Of course their will be some push back from environmentalist but you can't have your cake and eat it too. I know people that live paycheck to paycheck and increase their utility costs would push them into a very tough financial situation.  Those that are well off could care less how much they pay for fuel, or electricity.



Europe and Japan almost exclusively burn non recyclable trash.  Trash burning got a bad rep in the US in the late seventies and eighties when trash burner could get very high priced electric supply contracts so many got built with very primitive emissions controls. To minimize hauling costs the plants were frequently located in or quite close to cities usually in poor sections of the city.  The state of the art plants used in Europe and Japan have very impressive emissions control technology. it just costs money install and run it.  Scrubbers are just the start, usually its combination of scrubbers, wet electrostatic precipitators and possibly sorbent injection like activated carbon followed by another scrubbing stage.


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## SpaceBus (Dec 30, 2019)

peakbagger said:


> Europe and Japan almost exclusively burn non recyclable trash.  Trash burning got a bad rep in the US in the late seventies and eighties when trash burner could get very high priced electric supply contracts so many got built with very primitive emissions controls. To minimize hauling costs the plants were frequently located in or quite close to cities usually in poor sections of the city.  The state of the art plants used in Europe and Japan have very impressive emissions control technology. it just costs money install and run it.  Scrubbers are just the start, usually its combination of scrubbers, wet electrostatic precipitators and possibly sorbent injection like activated carbon followed by another scrubbing stage.


I always assumed burning waste to be a net loss in money or energy. Is the slag/ash useful?


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## peakbagger (Dec 30, 2019)

SpaceBus said:


> I always assumed burning waste to be a net loss in money or energy. Is the slag/ash useful?



If the alternative is landfilling it,  then burning it is lower cost disposal method even though they have to add supplemental fuel to make it burn. Plastic burns real well and tends be big portion of the wastestream so supplemental fuel is rarely required.  When trash is burned, he volume and weight goes way down so it takes up less space in landfill and costs less to haul. Some firms so try to recovered metals from the ash but expect its only makes sense when metal markets are sky high.  There is also a demand for the bottom ash as its mixed in with gravel for making temporary roads in landfills. The fly ash is usually just waste. My local landfill crushes all the glass they get from their recycling facility for the same purpose. Most landfills are mounds not holes in the ground and they have to ensure a minimum solids content of the waste to make sure the piles mounds stay up. If the waste is too wet like wastewater sludge, they need to blend it with solids to get it over minimum solids content. If they don't, the sides of the mounds can slump. The landfill in Hampden by I95 used to have that happen on occasion before it was closed. Depending on the type of waste a lot of the volume of landfill is just gravel. When our former mill landfill was mostly sludge from the pulp and  papermaking process, more than half the weight in the landfill was from gravel we had to mine and haul tot the site to make the sludge dry enough.  

Central Maine is betting on new type of waste disposal facility, https://fiberight.com/fiberight-maine/ Lots of folks wondering if its going to work out since its the first commercial plant in the world./


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## SpaceBus (Dec 30, 2019)

peakbagger said:


> If the alternative is landfilling it,  then burning it is lower cost disposal method even though they have to add supplemental fuel to make it burn. Plastic burns real well and tends be big portion of the wastestream so supplemental fuel is rarely required.  When trash is burned, he volume and weight goes way down so it takes up less space in landfill and costs less to haul. Some firms so try to recovered metals from the ash but expect its only makes sense when metal markets are sky high.  There is also a demand for the bottom ash as its mixed in with gravel for making temporary roads in landfills. The fly ash is usually just waste. My local landfill crushes all the glass they get from their recycling facility for the same purpose. Most landfills are mounds not holes in the ground and they have to ensure a minimum solids content of the waste to make sure the piles mounds stay up. If the waste is too wet like wastewater sludge, they need to blend it with solids to get it over minimum solids content. If they don't, the sides of the mounds can slump. The landfill in Hampden by I95 used to have that happen on occasion before it was closed. Depending on the type of waste a lot of the volume of landfill is just gravel. When our former mill landfill was mostly sludge from the pulp and  papermaking process, more than half the weight in the landfill was from gravel we had to mine and haul tot the site to make the sludge dry enough.
> 
> Central Maine is betting on new type of waste disposal facility, https://fiberight.com/fiberight-maine/ Lots of folks wondering if its going to work out since its the first commercial plant in the world./



In somewhat unrelated news I saw steam coming out of the Stored Solar facility in Whitneyville.


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## begreen (Jan 3, 2020)

peakbagger said:


> Central Maine is betting on new type of waste disposal facility, https://fiberight.com/fiberight-maine/ Lots of folks wondering if its going to work out since its the first commercial plant in the world./


Interesting. Our county has been considering alternative waste disposal including waste to energy, but the pushback from environmental groups has been strong. Their main concerns are emissions, especially dioxin, heavy metals and toxic ash disposal.  And then there is the huge cost. I have studied both the Amager-Bakke facility in Copenhagen and the WtE facilities in Tokyo. It's impressive how well these new facilities have cleaned up emissions. And the pragmatic way they are using the ash for road and even island building after heavy metals have been remove. But local environmental groups stay fixated on the problems of 40-50 yr old facilities in the US.  I'd like to know more  about the Fiberight facility and what its design emissions are and what will be done to treat and use the ash.


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## peakbagger (Jan 4, 2020)

I expect if the Fiberlight process works and stays in business there will be other municipalities that  will rush in. The state of Maine and much of New England have effectively banned new landfills and the remaining ones are owned by a couple of very large firms that make sure that they extract every dollar out of the effective monopolies they ended up with.  They charge what the market will bear and that drives the avoided cost for alternatives. The majority of the towns that support the Fiberlight process disposed of trash in a trash burner built in 1988. It had some real lucrative power contracts that supporting the operation and kept the trash disposal prices lower. That contract is over so the price of disposal was slated for a big increase. Fiberlight offers a lower disposal fee but the trade off is its the first commercial facility of its kind. Even though long term contracts are signed with lots of penalties there are not a lot of alternatives for the towns if the process doesnt work the way the developer thought it would. Ultimately it has to work, it just may cost more. I think I saw recent news that many of the claimed valuable "waste streams" that would keep the cost down didnt have any customers wanting to buy them. The problem from afar that I see is they place a lot of value on extracting organic waste and converting it to a flamable gas in an anaerobic digester. I just dont see that much organic waste in the waste stream although there is some as landfills generate some landfill gas by anerobic action which in many areas are burned to generate a small amount of power (compared to venting it). 

Everyone wants a "pot of gold" out of waste streams. Municipalities are under pressure to find the cheapest way to dispose of waste and developers are always coming up with the latest greatest new technology to turn that waste into "gold". In the vast number of cases the only "gold" that gets generated is into the developers pocket. The developers inevitably have a way of extracting themselves and their share of profits long before the plant runs long enough for its failings to appear. I have personally been technically involved with two such systems and still have a hand typed report I did back at my first real job 35 years ago that states the same thing that is true today. The BTU content of municipal waste is very low or negative due to it being wet. The far greater value is to minimize the weight and volume. There may be beneficial value to the waste ash but along with it there are long term liabilities so the best option is dispose of it in a lined landfill.


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## SpaceBus (Jan 4, 2020)

peakbagger said:


> I expect if the Fiberlight process works and stays in business there will be other municipalities that  will rush in. The state of Maine and much of New England have effectively banned new landfills and the remaining ones are owned by a couple of very large firms that make sure that they extract every dollar out of the effective monopolies they ended up with.  They charge what the market will bear and that drives the avoided cost for alternatives. The majority of the towns that support the Fiberlight process disposed of trash in a trash burner built in 1988. It had some real lucrative power contracts that supporting the operation and kept the trash disposal prices lower. That contract is over so the price of disposal was slated for a big increase. Fiberlight offers a lower disposal fee but the trade off is its the first commercial facility of its kind. Even though long term contracts are signed with lots of penalties there are not a lot of alternatives for the towns if the process doesnt work the way the developer thought it would. Ultimately it has to work, it just may cost more. I think I saw recent news that many of the claimed valuable "waste streams" that would keep the cost down didnt have any customers wanting to buy them. The problem from afar that I see is they place a lot of value on extracting organic waste and converting it to a flamable gas in an anaerobic digester. I just dont see that much organic waste in the waste stream although there is some as landfills generate some landfill gas by anerobic action which in many areas are burned to generate a small amount of power (compared to venting it).
> 
> Everyone wants a "pot of gold" out of waste streams. Municipalities are under pressure to find the cheapest way to dispose of waste and developers are always coming up with the latest greatest new technology to turn that waste into "gold". In the vast number of cases the only "gold" that gets generated is into the developers pocket. The developers inevitably have a way of extracting themselves and their share of profits long before the plant runs long enough for its failings to appear. I have personally been technically involved with two such systems and still have a hand typed report I did back at my first real job 35 years ago that states the same thing that is true today. The BTU content of municipal waste is very low or negative due to it being wet. The far greater value is to minimize the weight and volume. There may be beneficial value to the waste ash but along with it there are long term liabilities so the best option is dispose of it in a lined landfill.


Well, now I know why waste disposal is so expensive here. There have been many hidden costs that were not evident in our research before moving here. Overall it has been a big push for me personally to reduce my carbon footprint.


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## semipro (Jan 4, 2020)

begreen said:


> Interesting. Our county has been considering alternative waste disposal including waste to energy, but the pushback from environmental groups has been strong. Their main concerns are emissions, especially dioxin, heavy metals and toxic ash disposal.  And then there is the huge cost. I have studied both the Amager-Bakke facility in Copenhagen and the WtE facilities in Tokyo. It's impressive how well these new facilities have cleaned up emissions. And the pragmatic way they are using the ash for road and even island building after heavy metals have been remove. But local environmental groups stay fixated on the problems of 40-50 yr old facilities in the US.  I'd like to know more  about the Fiberight facility and what its design emissions are and what will be done to treat and use the ash.


More about the Fiberight process here. Unfortunately the link to the University of Maine report at the URL above is dead.
They are doing only cellulosic materials so its not like they're taking on plastics or mixed waste.

I don't think we're giving current WTE technology a fair shake in the U.S., especially WRT tough-to-recycle waste streams such as mixed plastics.
I also think there's an incredible missed opportunity for conversion of closed coal power plants to WTE plants.  They are typically located in remote locations and already have the transportation, material handling, and waste storage infrastructure in place .  Of course, incinerators and associated scrubbers etc. would need to be upgraded to current tech.


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## ABMax24 (Jan 4, 2020)

Another option is a Bioreactor Landfill. We have one here that was one of the first in the world when it was opened. But of course this method still requires a landfill, but it can capture the methane that is typically released to the atmosphere and use it to generate electricity. It still doesn't do a good job of breaking down the plastics. Which would lead me to believe that sorting the waste stream would offer the best results, sort out the plastics and other high energy fuels to burn in a waste to energy plant, while sending the water saturated organics and non-organics to the landfill to be decomposed for landfill gas.

Here is the fact sheet of the Bioreactor Landfill we have here in town, the gas is used to generate electricity that helps to power the adjacent water treatment plant:



			https://www.aquatera.ca/public/download/documents/51026


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## semipro (Jan 4, 2020)

The problem with landfills is that we haven't been able to build one yet that doesn't leak into the underlying aquifers.  At least when I used to work with them 20 years ago that was the case.  Whether clay or synthetic or a combination of both, they leak and what they release is particularly nasty stuff.  Bioreactor landfills sound like a great idea but the degradation products of some common compounds are much more toxic than the original material.  Trichloroethylene, (TCE) the 2nd most prevalent contaminant of groundwater after petroleum products, is a good example.   
its interesting too how this stuff ends up in landfills.  TCE used to be used to dissolve sewer pipe clogs and so it ended up in septic systems.  It then ended up in the groundwater via the leach field and some was transported to, and disposed at, landfills in septic sludge.


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## ABMax24 (Jan 4, 2020)

The one nice thing around here is our ground water is deep, trapped in layers of sandstone under relatively impermeable rock. Not that it makes leaching acceptable.

The problem we have similar to many other areas is no one wants to burn garbage, so it is going in a landfill either way.


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## semipro (Jan 4, 2020)

ABMax24 said:


> The one nice thing around here is our ground water is deep, trapped in layers of sandstone under relatively impermeable rock. Not that it makes leaching acceptable.


That may protect you for a while but every well that penetrates that sandstone layer to get to the clean water below also presents a potential pathway for the contaminated water above to migrate into the lower aquifer.   Yes, wells installed properly are sealed with something like Bentonite or grout to prevent this but these seals have also been shown to degrade with time and leak.  With clay seals like Bentonite, exposure to organic solvents like TCE actually results in seal desiccation and shrinkage, which leads to cracking and leaking.
The subsurface and what goes on there is much more complex than most realize and its very hard to clean up once compromised. That's what really concerns me about deep waste injection wells and fracking for FF production.


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## ABMax24 (Jan 4, 2020)

semipro said:


> That may protect you for a while but every well that penetrates that sandstone layer to get to the clean water below also presents a potential pathway for the contaminated water above to migrate into the lower aquifer.   Yes, wells installed properly are sealed with something like Bentonite or grout to prevent this but these seals have also been shown to degrade with time and leak.  With clay seals like Bentonite, exposure to organic solvents like TCE actually results in seal desiccation and shrinkage, which leads to cracking and leaking.
> The subsurface and what goes on there is much more complex than most realize and its very hard to clean up once compromised. That's what really concerns me about deep waste injection wells and fracking for FF production.



Definitely not arguing the potential is there, but we have hundreds of oil and gas wells in the area, all of which that are being drilled now are being fracked, if there will be contaminated odds are it will come from that.


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## begreen (Jan 4, 2020)

Looks like Fiberight is using Maine as a guinea pig. I can see why they want to go this route now that govt. biofuel credits are interesting, but will it work and is this the right way to deal with municipal waste? I still haven't been able to find anything on emissions for this process. Peak, do you have any sources for this info?








						Why Fiberight would take Maine in wrong direction on waste
					

OpEd: Municipal Review Committee towns face a difficult decision.




					bangordailynews.com


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## SpaceBus (Jan 4, 2020)

The part about no longer recycling or composting waste is troubling.


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## begreen (Jan 4, 2020)

SpaceBus said:


> The part about no longer recycling or composting waste is troubling.


Yes, and not the way it should be designed or run. Comingling always add contamination. As I looked into Copenhagen's Amager-Bakke plant and its effects on the city I found just the opposite is true. The city of Copenhagen has an exemplary and comprehensive recycling program. They have 18 different recycling systems that break down into major categories which cover organics, electronics, construction, paper & cardboard, plastics, metals, textiles (and upholstery) and toxics + lightbulbs. They also have a citywide battery collection system. You can also pick up compost for your home garden for free. 

People being people however, some still do not recycle. And recycling does not capture all waste. The Amaker-Bakke facility is designed to cope with this reality. It also solves the issue of disposing medical waste. Hopefully, ME mimics their practices. 
https://www.a-r-c.dk/privat/farvezoner (use Google Translate)


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## peakbagger (Jan 4, 2020)

Sorry the amount of info I have seen on Fiberlight has been limited. I did wonder about the fundamental decision that were was enough organic waste to run aerobic digester on a municipal trash stream. Generally I was led to believe that the predominant leftover from a properly sorted and recycled trash stream was rubber and low grade plastics. VT has been slowly implementing composting programs to divert compostables out of their waste stream but have run into issues with contaminants getting  carried into the compost stream. Compost is only valuable if its clean of contaminants.

BTW the reference to the Old Town Mill and jet fuel is left over from several years ago. One of the waste streams from turning wood into paper fiber (cellulose) is hemicellulose. It normally went along with the lignin to be burnt in the chemical recovery process but one of the prior mill owners (who went bankrupt) was separating the hemicellulose and other chemical from the lignin. They worked with the nearby University of Maine Pulp and Paper research labs.  Technically these processes have been known for years but it all comes down to its more expensive to make biobased alternatives to fossil based feedstocks then it is to use fossil


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## SpaceBus (Jan 4, 2020)

peakbagger said:


> Sorry the amount of info I have seen on Fiberlight has been limited. I did wonder about the fundamental decision that were was enough organic waste to run aerobic digester on a municipal trash stream. Generally I was led to believe that the predominant leftover from a properly sorted and recycled trash stream was rubber and low grade plastics. VT has been slowly implementing composting programs to divert compostables out of their waste stream but have run into issues with contaminants getting  carried into the compost stream. Compost is only valuable if its clean of contaminants.
> 
> BTW the reference to the Old Town Mill and jet fuel is left over from several years ago. One of the waste streams from turning wood into paper fiber (cellulose) is hemicellulose. It normally went along with the lignin to be burnt in the chemical recovery process but one of the prior mill owners (who went bankrupt) was separating the hemicellulose and other chemical from the lignin. They worked with the nearby University of Maine Pulp and Paper research labs.  Technically these processes have been known for years but it all comes down to its more expensive to make biobased alternatives to fossil based feedstocks then it is to use fossil


After learning on the hearth.com forums and elsewhere for the past year it seems that biological feedstocks will definitely be replacing fossil feedstocks. Especially stuff like sugar cane and other crop wastes. I don't think trees/wood will be used as a fuel/energy feedstock due to the long period of time it takes for the materials to replenish. Combined with carbon capture technology this type of fuel should be carbon neutral or even negative with the proper biomass management.


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## begreen (Jan 4, 2020)

peakbagger said:


> Generally I was led to believe that the predominant leftover from a properly sorted and recycled trash stream was rubber and low grade plastics.


Incineration should be the last resort. Over 50% of the waste stream is packaging. On average organic waste constitutes a bit more than 28% of household waste. 

Americans generate a huge and disproportional amount of waste. Some of the facts are mindboggling. For example:
The US population discards each year 16,000,000,000 diapers, 1,600,000,000 pens, 2,000,000,000 razor blades, 220,000,000 car tires, and enough aluminum to rebuild the US commercial air fleet four times over.


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## blades (Jan 4, 2020)

the cost of recovering usable material is the catch 22 of all the programs. in some case the recovery methods currently in use create by- products worse than the parent material as alluded to early in the thread.


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## Easy Livin’ 3000 (Jan 5, 2020)

I suspect that future generations will regard the way we are currently handling waste, much the same way that we regard the people from the dark ages and their waste handling (dumping their chamber pots onto the streets).


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## Seasoned Oak (Jan 5, 2020)

This is one area where Govt Subsidies make sense. Make it profitable to do the right thing and costly to pollute ,and
 things will change.


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## blades (Jan 5, 2020)

Problem with GoV. handouts, if and when they stop, those collecting follow suite.


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## peakbagger (Jan 5, 2020)

I seem to remember about 25 years ago how some big city in PA bet the towns future on a big waste to energy project and the project crashed and burned. I think they had to go bankrupt and go through some real lean years until they got clear of it. Towns and cities around Portland Maine have a WTE power plant that seems to run pretty well and stays under the radar. 

There is a plant that makes recyclable recycled fiber food trays and packaging in Maine. The brand they make is Chinet but its owned by some Japanese firm. They lost a lot of business over the years to foam and are definitely taking advantage of the banning of foam.


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## Brian26 (Jan 5, 2020)

Connecticut has been burning almost all their waste in trash to energy plants for decades. There are like 6-8 good size plants in the state.  For a small state with no active landfills it beats trucking it out of state. There was though a big issue with a plant in Hartford this year where both turbines went down. They had to be sent to Missouri to be rebuilt and they had to ship tons of trash for months out of state. It supposedly cost millions of dollars and took hundreds of trucks to haul it.

You should see the trash truck volume on 80 west into PA from NYC. I drive that way alot and the amount of trash trucks heading into PA is mind blowing. I believe I asked a trucker once and he said it mostly goes to some massive trash to energy plant in PA.


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## begreen (Jan 5, 2020)

peakbagger said:


> Towns and cities around Portland Maine have a WTE power plant that seems to run pretty well and stays under the radar.


Is this because the prevailing winds take stack emissions over the Atlantic?


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## SpaceBus (Jan 6, 2020)

peakbagger said:


> I seem to remember about 25 years ago how some big city in PA bet the towns future on a big waste to energy project and the project crashed and burned. I think they had to go bankrupt and go through some real lean years until they got clear of it. Towns and cities around Portland Maine have a WTE power plant that seems to run pretty well and stays under the radar.
> 
> There is a plant that makes recyclable recycled fiber food trays and packaging in Maine. The brand they make is Chinet but its owned by some Japanese firm. They lost a lot of business over the years to foam and are definitely taking advantage of the banning of foam.



I noticed the trays at the hospital in Ellsworth are made of recycled (cellulose I assume) fibers.



begreen said:


> Is this because the prevailing winds take stack emissions over the Atlantic.



I think this would just blow it up over Maine, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland


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## peakbagger (Jan 6, 2020)

begreen said:


> Is this because the prevailing winds take stack emissions over the Atlantic.


My guess is its a newer plant with the right emissions control technology. Its actually inland a bit from the shore.  My guess is they have sorbent technology upstream of scrubber. it was developed to clean up the coal industry and its pretty amazing stuff. Looking at the stack at the site, its pretty low which implies that if there are nasties it would have low level impacts. There is major insurance company complex that has been developed over the years right across the highway and a very well off neighborhood just a short distance away. I expect there if there were any nasties coming out the stack there would be plenty of well funded NIMBY folks lined up to fight it. 

The permit is public record if I want to spend the time digging for it. That should summarize the technology.


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## peakbagger (Jan 6, 2020)

Here is a link to the permit. Several pages in is a nice sketch of the system.



			https://www.maine.gov/dep/ftp/AIR/licenses/titlev/A0283FRA.pdf
		


Looks like I guessed right. It lists lime and carbon as sorbent for the nasties' followed by a scrubber to take the big sorbents out of the air steam, then a electrostatic precipitator to take out small particulate. The boiler uses an inclined stepped grate which is also pretty well the current standard for a grate. Overall it may not be absolute state of the art but pretty darn good, far better than the units built in the eighties that didn't use sorbents, scrubber or SCR. They do have Selective Non Catalytic Reduction (SCNR) NOX system which might be a bit old school compared to a Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) catalyst but in order to put a SCR  in they would need to reheat the gases downstream of the electrostatic precipitators to get the gases back up to reaction temperature as otherwise the catalyst would get plugged with particulate.  It can be done but that means another source of fuel to be combusted where as SCNR just sprays the ammonia into the boiler at the right temperature zone. The spent sorbents get mixed with the ash stream and I expect landfilled. There are sometimes beneficial uses for ash but potential long term liabilities in case something not currently controlled is in the ash. The general approach is landfill it where it may have some use for thickening wet solids or for temporary roads. They also have a magnet on the bottom ash conveyor to grab any magnetic materials for recycling but expect that's a borderline proposition unless recycling markets are doing well. . Notice the air flow pattern through the building, they keep the air flow "negative" through the trash receiving area to keep the facility from smelling outside the plant . I expect it gets "ripe" inside during warm weather.

Note all these emissions controls have a heat rate cost so the plant puts out less power as more power is used internally to run the emissions equipment. The sorbents also cost money to buy and dispose. The communities that support it would need to truck the waste to the nearest landfill if they didn't have the plant . The nearest landfill which I think is Rochester NH is about 60 miles away. Some states limit import of trash so the next closest landfill in Maine is around 70 miles. They would be trucking a lot of air in the unprocessed waste and burning diesel to do so. Instead they only need to landfill about 1/10 the the volume and weight of ash. They also have an integrated recycling facility so they are attempting to get the recyclables out of the system.  Not sure how fancy they get with recycling. Ferrous metals are easy to grab but non ferrous not so much. I think there are some devices that can sort non ferrous out of waste stream but not sure exactly how.

I don't think the plant has any district heating opportunities due to its location, but in Europe they put in stainless steel stacks and condensing heat exchangers upstream of the stack to heat water with flue gas that is then pumped to local district heating system.  The flue gas plume gets pretty cool so they need a very tall stack to get reasonable dispersal.

A properly run plant like this is expensive to build and run but its beats many of the alternatives. That is why most of Europe and Japan have adopted it.


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## semipro (Jan 6, 2020)

begreen said:


> Incineration should be the last resort.


I wonder if this is still true when you consider life cycle aspects and newer incineration and contaminant capture technologies. 
It seems that for now at least, GHG production issues relegates incineration to a last resort.


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## blades (Jan 10, 2020)

Many years back  the city of Milwaukee WI invested in a waste energy plant- yep it went bust, for all kinds of problems.  I do not remember what became of it, just remember taxes going up to pay for it.


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## Sodbuster (Mar 6, 2020)

When my wife was a student in college, their class was invited to tour the waste to energy plant in Grand Rapids, MI, so I decided to tag along. All refuse was dumped into a pit where a large grapple would grab scoops of debris and feed a huge conveyor belt. I powerful magnet would pull out the metal, and I believe the glass was also separated somehow. The rest went into the incinerator which burned at a very high temperature. The entire process was quite fascinating to see, but a little smelly. This was about 25 years ago, so they may have made some modifications, but it kept a lot of trash out of the landfill and produced energy. Even if it's a zero sum game it's a win.  For those of you interested here's a link. 









						Kent County Department of Public Works
					

Reimagine Trash… as a resource, as a feedstock, as an opportunity.




					www.reimaginetrash.org


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## begreen (Mar 6, 2020)

Old school incineration, but effective in reducing the volume that ends up being landfilled. The downside is the emissions. WtE can be done well, but most systems in the US are 40+ yrs old and dirty.


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## Sodbuster (Mar 6, 2020)

begreen said:


> Old school incineration, but effective in reducing the volume that ends up being landfilled. The downside is the emissions. WtE can be done well, but most systems in the US are 40+ yrs old and dirty.



True, but with today's technology, it would be nice if the older plants can be retrofitted with more efficient scrubbers.


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## begreen (Mar 7, 2020)

Sodbuster said:


> True, but with today's technology, it would be nice if the older plants can be retrofitted with more efficient scrubbers.


Can be done in some cases, at high cost. They did this in Tokyo around 1999.


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## peakbagger (Mar 7, 2020)

A waste to energy incinerator lives a fairly hard life and the way that trash is burned has changed. Yes an older plant can have an emissions upgrade but generally its throwing good money after bad as the rest of the plant is wearing out so "up time" is reduced as all the supporting systems are getting old. Modern plants also have changed the way waste is brought into the facility to reduce the odor from the trash. The air emissions laws also factor in, if an owner spends over a certain amount to rebuild a plant, the plant  can be subject to new plant performance standards.

Older plants are usually "grandfathered" to the performance standards that cover the entire plant, technology and pollution standards improve over the years so new plants need to meet the new standards. It frequently not practical to upgrade the entire plant to the new standards so the owner is better off finding a willing host offering better incentives and building a new plant. Waste to energy is generally not profitable from an energy production basis, its really waste minimization facility with an added benefit of electric power and waste diversion. The Europeans pretty much banned burying trash so the next best thing was to burn it.


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## Sodbuster (Mar 7, 2020)

peakbagger said:


> A waste to energy incinerator lives a fairly hard life and the way that trash is burned has changed. Yes an older plant can have an emissions upgrade but generally its throwing good money after bad as the rest of the plant is wearing out so "up time" is reduced as all the supporting systems are getting old. Modern plants also have changed the way waste is brought into the facility to reduce the odor from the trash. The air emissions laws also factor in, if an owner spends over a certain amount to rebuild a plant, the plant  can be subject to new plant performance standards.
> 
> Older plants are usually "grandfathered" to the performance standards that cover the entire plant, technology and pollution standards improve over the years so new plants need to meet the new standards. It frequently not practical to upgrade the entire plant to the new standards so the owner is better off finding a willing host offering better incentives and building a new plant. Waste to energy is generally not profitable from an energy production basis, its really waste minimization facility with an added benefit of electric power and waste diversion. The Europeans pretty much banned burying trash so the next best thing was to burn it.



I agree, as with anything there are generally a downside, a win-win is very rare. At least you are gaining electricity or steam from an incinerator vs burying the problem for future generations to deal with. It would be nice if the "smart" people could come up with a standardized plant that could easily be replicated over and over, which would reduce cost.  As we've talked about plastic doesn't go away, at least not in the short term, and recycling is just a feel good measure in many areas of the country, there is just not enough demand for recycled plastics, which is the main culprit.


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## peakbagger (Mar 7, 2020)

Sodbuster said:


> I agree, as with anything there are generally a downside, a win-win is very rare. At least you are gaining electricity or steam from an incinerator vs burying the problem for future generations to deal with. It would be nice if the "smart" people could come up with a standardized plant that could easily be replicated over and over, which would reduce cost.  As we've talked about plastic doesn't go away, at least not in the short term, and recycling is just a feel good measure in many areas of the country, there is just not enough demand for recycled plastics, which is the main culprit.


Covanta bought the rights to one of the German technologies, they are about as close to standard plants in the US. I used to work on some regional biomass plants that were "cousins" they were a somewhat standardized layout with some minor differences. 

My guess for plastics is convert them back to oil and make the oil companies use a portion of the plastic derived oil in fuel.


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## mustash29 (Apr 19, 2020)

I spent 2 years moving frozen goods from a truck into a walk in freezer and then out to the coffins in the store.  Good high school job.

Uncle Sam taught me a bunch of cool stuff, let me play aircraft carrier reactor operator for a while, then had me repairing submarine engine rooms.  That was a fun 10 years.  Guys used to dream about their post military aspirations.  One popular joke was "riding around on the back of a garbage truck."  LOL.

I did a 6 week maintenance outage as a health physics tech at a dual 850 MW PWR plant down south.  Interesting and fun, but I had enough of living out of a suitcase (seabag).

I don't pay for garbage disposal, it goes to work with me.  I've been burning societies unwanted leftovers for the past 20 years.  It's a fascinating evolution and pays quite well.  Updraft gasification, 2000 deg F in the fuel bed, SNCR (urea) injection in the furnace for Nox control, carbon injection (heavy metal) and lime slurry (acid gasses) treat the exhaust before the flue gas is scrubbed by hepa filters in the baghouse.  Gross metals are removed from the ash stream.  Ash is processed again at the landfill for further (smaller) metals removal via magnetic & reverse magnetic separation.  My plant is relatively small at 500 tons per day.  15 MW/hr (2 MW house load, selling 13).

I often wonder why we don't have a WTE facility located next to every landfill in the US mining yesteryears garbage and recovering the energy and recyclables from it.


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## begreen (Apr 19, 2020)

It's been many decades since I lived in CT. These plants went in after I left. It looks like CT has 6 WTE plants.  Does the state or do the facilities provide emissions data for things like dioxins?

How good are the recycling programs there now? Do they aggressively recycle first or do they burn everything in lieu of recycling?


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## peakbagger (Apr 20, 2020)

With tail end equipment like that I expect Dioxin and mercury are close to  non detect. I am surprised I didnt see a bit of Trona injection but due to trucking costs, carbon gets used a lot in the East coast. Not cheap to build. Its the same sort of tech used in Germany and Japan. A plant like that is never going to break even just selling power, its got to be have another stream of revenue from tipping fees and that means driving up the cost of landfills by making them very expensive, outlawing new ones or just banning trash to be put in them. 

Most areas in the US dont have the political will to put in a properly designed WTE plants, they just want the trash gone and preferably not in their backyard.


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## Brian26 (Apr 21, 2020)

begreen said:


> It's been many decades since I lived in CT. These plants went in after I left. It looks like CT has 6 WTE plants.  Does the state or do the facilities provide emissions data for things like dioxins?
> 
> How good are the recycling programs there now? Do they aggressively recycle first or do they burn everything in lieu of recycling?



I remember reading we essentially burn all our trash in WTE plants in CT. I think we were early adopters to the technology but the plants are outdated. There was big news last year when a 1920s coal plant converted in Hartford to a WTE plant decades ago lost a turbine and was down for months. There are no active landfills in CT so the trash had to be hauled to PA by truck at extremely high cost.

I think we have a strong recycling program here and believe all the trash is sorted for metals, plastics, etc before its burned. One issue that needs work though is I remember reading that when they analyzed the trash being burned it was mostly food waste. 

Helping is also the fact that we have like the 2nd highest electricity rates here after HI. I'm sure that plays a big role. There are proposals to update many of the plants as with no active landfills I'm sure it beats trucking the waste out.


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## CaptSpiff (Apr 21, 2020)

Brian26 said:


> Helping is also the fact that we have like the 2nd highest electricity rates here after HI. I'm sure that plays a big role. There are proposals to update many of the plants as with no active landfills I'm sure it beats trucking the waste out.


Don't bet on trucking being cheaper, PA is increasing their tipping fees each year.

We (Long Island) are in the same boat as CT. Most of our land fills were closed and capped back in the 80's. We got about half a dozen WTE plants under the 1980's PURPA regs. They have been mostly consolidated under the Covanta energy banner. Local jurisdictions levy a sanitation tax, which pays private carters to collect and tip at these local WTE plants. The tipping fees are negotiated with the local jurisdictions, who also guarantee minimum levels of tonnage. The tipping fees are pretty high, so the carters try to remove metals (bicycles, bed frame rails, etc) at pickup. The WTE usually burns everything and does its metal separation at the ash handling process. The metal is a small revenue source, the ash is trucked out.

There were some very bad pollution incidents in the early 80's with the WTE's , but the newer designs along with tight inspections have made these WTE plants pretty good neighbors.


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## peakbagger (Apr 21, 2020)

I will agree on the early US plants being dirty. PURPA passed in 1978 and with the avoided power rates being offered, WTE was slam  dunk, the plants got high prices for power plus tipping fees. The EPA regs really didnt deal well with WTE and the developers were in rush to cash in. The net result were poorly built plants with marginal emission controls. Once built the communities that depended on them didnt have a lot of options so they kept them running. Once the initial PURPA contracts ran out the original developers were long gone and the economics got far less lucrative they kept running on a tighter margin and many tended to let them deteriorate. In one case a landfill owner bought a plant for cheap  in Biddeford Maine, then ran the plant for few years and then got the community to pay to shut them down.


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## begreen (Apr 21, 2020)

Sounds like Connecticut's CRRA program is pretty good. I checked the old hometown (Cornwall, CT) recycling program and it's quite robust. CRRA pays them to recycle. Good going.


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## peakbagger (Jun 12, 2020)

Looks like the new first in the nation waste recycling technology plant in Maine is in financial difficulties https://bangordailynews.com/2020/06...rations-on-hold-as-it-struggles-to-pay-bills/


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## SpaceBus (Jun 12, 2020)

peakbagger said:


> Looks like the new first in the nation waste recycling technology plant in Maine is in financial difficulties https://bangordailynews.com/2020/06...rations-on-hold-as-it-struggles-to-pay-bills/


Not surprising given the global atmosphere at the moment. Crazy times we are living in.


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