Why don't y'all just burn it, you might think when it comes to Albany's garbage problem. After all, incineration seems like a quick and easy process to taking care of Albany's quickly running out landfill. Certainly playing with matches has a lot of allure for a pyromaniac like myself. Yet, it seems that burning a city's garbage is plagued with a variety problems including minimal volume reduction, cost, relatively low energy production, and pollution.

Reduction of Volume

Modern waste-to-energy plants average about a 80-90 percent reduction by volume of municipal solid waste. That means for every ten loads of trash burned, roughly two loads of highly toxic ash has to be hauled off to a landfill somewheres and disposed of according to state regulations. Most of that ash volume is bottom ash, but it also mixed with fly ash caught in pollution equipment that is highly toxic and in quantities far greater then what the trash originally contained in toxins.

The alternative is about 70-75 percentage reduction in volume by landfilling, possibly increased to 75-80 percent by shredding garbage before landfilling it like the city of Albany right now. That garbage contains a number of toxins just like the incinerated garbage, however the percentage of toxins is far lower and much of the garbage locks in the toxins and reduces the chances of serious contamination.

Pollution

Burning trash is dirty business, particularly when your burning hundreds of tons of garbage every day. Waste-to-energy plant operators point out the small dioxin emissions thanks to high temperatures and what's captured by the bag filters, ignoring all of the other more conventional pollutants that incinerators release into the air.

Massive amounts of nitrous oxides and sulfur dioxides are released from these big garbage burning plants, far more then equivalent amounts produced by gas or oil burning plants. There is also concerning amounts of metals and a variety of gases that are released from a diverse amount of trash going into burn plants. If you have ever stood downwind to a piece of electronic equipment, then imagine hundreds of pieces being burned at a once.

Lack of Useful Energy Created

While waste-to-energy incinerators talk about the useful electricity or steam they produce, the energy value is rather small compared to the massive amounts of pollutants that they spew. You could generate far more energy by using a clean natural gas plant. A lot of energy produced in an incinerator goes to power itself, such as shredding, sorting, and drying garbage before trying to burn it. The energy value from garbage is rather slight compared most other fuels, largely because it's many different things burning some with higher energy values then others, along with others that don't burn at all.

Cost

It costs a lot of money to build a modern municipal incinerator. Many estimates suggest building a new plant would cost as much as $200 million dollars to say nothing of operating costs. The average incinerator requires tipping fees as high as $100-$150 a ton to be profitable, while the average garbage dump in New York State costs only about $40-$70 to be profitable. That's a big difference in cost for very little reduction in waste volume, very little energy generation, or value to a community.

The difference in cost of operating an incinerator and a garbage dump could be used in ways that would benefit a community. A landfill might take up space, but the savings in dumping garbage could be used to promote smart growth and protect farm land or forest at far greater of a rate then the cost of burning it. Nobody likes landfills as they are ugly and smelly, but the cost savings can do much to improve communities around them.

Conclusions

Burning garbage in mass burn incinerators is a poor solution to our solid waste problems. We need to find ways to reduce the amount of trash we are producing, by expanding recycling programs and reducing packaging. We also need to look at changing how our society buys and consumes so much stuff, and how we can make things more durable and lasting.