Can incineration solve our looming garbage problem?
Durham Region is months away from firing up its energy-from-waste plant, the first in the GTA in decades.

Thestar.com
June 15, 2014
ByJessica McDiarmid

Every year, some 3,100 trucks carrying 100,000 tonnes of trash make the journey from York and Durham to Model City, New York, to dump the regions’ garbage in someone else’s backyard.

But soon, those trucks will trundle along a service road just south of Hwy. 401 and pull onto a stretch of brand new blacktop leading to a large, silver-sided complex. They’ll disappear inside through an oversized garage door.

Over the course of a year, those trucks will dump as much as 140,000 tonnes of household trash to be burned.

The Durham York Energy Centre, a $284-million waste-to-energy facility, is on course for completion by August, though final touches and adjustments will continue for months afterward.

It will burn the household waste that isn’t recycled for all of Durham region, as well as a portion of York, using the heat generated to create electricity. It has not been without controversy.

Opponents of so-called waste-to-energy facilities argue that emissions pose health hazards; that they create an ongoing demand for waste and discourage recycling; that they’re inordinately expensive.

“It’s bad for the climate, bad for community health and bad for our economy,” said Ananda Tan, a spokesperson for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, an umbrella organization that advocates “zero waste.”

But industry and municipalities that have bought into the approach contend modern waste-to-energy facilities are not the incinerators of years past that functioned as enormous backyard burning barrels spewing toxins. The production of energy offsets the high cost to an extent; places that incinerate most of their garbage also tend to have high rates of recycling.

And garbage has got to go somewhere.

“There are no new landfills being built out there,” said Greg Borchuk, Durham Region’s project manager for the facility. “Probably the only thing harder than permitting this would be permitting a landfill.”

Durham has relied on landfills in the GTA and the U.S. since the region came to exist in 1974. By the mid-90s, with a growing population, the region began mulling a “local solution” to waste disposal.

The closure of Michigan’s Pine Tree Acres Landfill in 2006 added urgency as the region negotiated a short-term agreement to divert waste to the New York state landfill.

Zero waste is “a beautiful idea,” said Borchuk. “Someday we’ll get there, maybe. But we needed an answer now.”

Toronto is approaching a similar conundrum. With the city’s current waste diversion rate hovering just above 50 per cent, its Green Lane Landfill near London, Ont., is expected to last until 2029.

The city is in the early stages of developing a long-term waste strategy. Earlier this month, the public works and infrastructure committee approved a report recommending a new strategy be developed that puts more emphasis on diversion.

The report suggests studying a variety of technologies to deal with waste, including some that turn waste into energy, buying another landfill or expanding Green Lane landfill, among other options.

Peel Region is moving to replace its Algonquin Power burn facility with a much larger plant. Work could begin as soon as next year.

The facility in Clarington, about 60 kilometres east of Toronto, will process household waste from both Durham and York regions.

Garbage will be dumped into a pit and two crane grapples, operated from a control room that looks down on the pit, will stir it - trash is not a particularly uniform fuel - before feeding it into one of two combustion chambers.

There, at temperatures of at least 1,000 C, the trash of well over half a million people will be mostly reduced to ash in about an hour.

Heat from combustion boils water in surrounding pipes to create steam, which powers a turbine-driven generator to create electricity that powers the facility. The remainder will be sold to the electrical grid.

Heavy ash???? falls into a recovery area where it’s picked through for leftover metals, which can then be sorted and sold.

Gas and fly ash??? is fed through a system that injects lime to reduce acidity and activated carbon - essentially fine charcoal - to bind with heavy metals such as mercury.

The gas is then fed into a “bag house,” where it’s forced through hundreds of fabric filters that catch particulates before it exits the stack.

Remaining ash - about 70 per cent less material by weight, 90 per cent less by volume - goes to landfill.

The filtering processes result in “dramatically reduced emissions,” said Paul Gilman, chief sustainability officer for the New Jersey-based company Covanta Energy that’s building the facility and has a 20-year contract to operate it.

“While people call them incinerators, they’re nothing like incinerators in the past,” said Gilman.

Nickolas Themelis, director of the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University, said fears about emissions from waste-to-energy facilities are just that - fears.

“They are subject to the most stringent environmental conditions,” said Themelis. “These are higher standards than for other high-temperature combustion plants.”

A 2009 study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that compared emissions and efficiency of using landfill gas versus waste-to-energy to generate electricity suggested emissions from landfill projects were generally higher, though waste-to-energy has “significantly higher” hydrochloric acid emissions.

Waste-to-energy opponents have worried about the emissions of dioxins, toxic chemicals that can cause cancers, among other health impacts. But Themelis said recent studies showed those emissions, in a modern facility, are low.

“There’s no problem with dioxins, it’s inconsequential,” said Themelis. “Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a scare.”

There are more than 85 waste-to-energy plants operating in the U.S. The practice is far more widespread in Europe, where population density and smaller land mass forced the move away from landfill earlier.

Christian Ludwig, a professor of solid waste management at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Lausanne, Switzerland, said statistically, countries that use incineration rather than landfill tend to have higher rates of waste diversion. Switzerland’s recycling rate, in 2010, was about 51 per cent, similar to Durham region, which has set itself a lofty 70 per cent goal.

Efficient recycling is vital, said Ludwig.

“But something will remain,” he said. “The better you recycle, the more difficult it is to deal with what’s remaining.”

Materials that can’t be recycled can pose hazards if simply dumped in landfill, leeching chemicals into the environment.

“You have to carefully check that if you incinerate, that you do the best you can do. But without incineration, the picture of waste treatment is not complete. You need something complimentary to the recycling for the parts that are very difficult to recycle.”