For the sustainability lovers, deciding whether something belongs in the trash or recycling bin is the last thought given to their garbage. But what happens after the trash collectors have picked up your scraps on the side walk?
Most of the time, the trash ends up here. A landfill. Ever consider that maybe some of your energy is going here? That’s right, your house. Companies for the last several decades have been working toward perfecting waste to energy facilities around the globe.
In the Washington, DC area alone, Convanta Energy owns three facilities that collectively power about 120,000 homes by incinerating trash.
trash to energy conversion
So in brief, how in the world does this work?
- The trash is brought to the facility
- The trash is burned
- The heat created boils water
- The water creates steam that turns a turbine
- Electricity is produced and put on the grid
(For those who might get a little confused about this long process, Convanta kindly created a step-by-step if you are looking for even more details).
More recently, gasification is becoming more popular in trash to energy facilities. This process doesn’t actually burn the trash down, but rather breaks the trash down with heat and oxygen to create syngas. This chemical combination has the ability to also create energy and does not release pollutants into the air like incineration does.
Currently, there are 89 waste to energy facilities in the country producing about 2,500 megawatt hours of electricity. According to Covanta, about 10 megawatt hours of electricity can fully power approximately 20,000 homes. For those of you who aren’t math geniuses and calculate that in your head, that means that the US is powering about 5,000,000 homes with trash right now.
How does this compare to other countries? Well currently, 54% of trash in the united states ends up in landfills. In Denmark, only 4% makes it to a landfill. So clearly we still have a long way to go.
But most importantly, what about that smell? Don’t worry, they have fans everywhere sucking it up so they don’t have unhappy neighbors. To the workers, after day 26 its starts smelling like roses.
#THINKFWD 
