Fiscal Woes, Long-Held Fears Spur Waste-to-Energy Debate

New York is thinking about diverting garbage from out-of-state landfills and using it to generate electricity locally. The plan pits concerns about city spending and carbon emissions against fears of environmental injustice.

By Bill Hughes | Wednesday, Oct 10, 2012

CityLimits.org

In the years since a tugboat nosed the last barge full of garbage into the massive Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island when it was officially closed back in March of 2001, the tax burden and environmental impact of dealing with New York City's trash have increased dramatically. City officials estimate that in a single year, tractor-trailers log 40 million miles to haul 3 million tons of trash from the five boroughs to out-of-state landfills, mostly in Pennsylvania and Virginia. The flat cost of shipping trash to landfills has risen from $62 per ton in 2001 to $92 per ton last year. A recent report by the Citizen's Budget Commission concluded that, "The waste that New York City sends to landfills generates about 679,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases per year – the equivalent of adding more than 133,000 cars to the roads."

To address the growing problem, Mayor Michael Bloomberg included a partial solution in his 30-year master plan for the city, PlaNYC, which calls for the construction of a new Waste-to-Energy (WTE) facility to process trash that cannot be recycled. A Request for Proposals (RFP) was issued in March of 2012 to the private sector to build a facility, "…using reliable, cost-effective, sustainable and environmentally sound waste to clean energy technology."

Among the requirements in the RFP was a mandate that the pilot facility be located either in the five boroughs or within an 80-mile radius of the city. It would have to begin by processing 450 tons per day, with the city making no capital investment but paying a tipping fee once it starts sending trash. The 450-ton per day capacity would have to double if the pilot is successful. The bid went out in March, applications were due by June 5th and the award was supposed to be announced in early September. A Bloomberg spokesman last week said the proposals were still under review and an announcement might be made in November. The administration estimates that over 30 years if expanded facilities could accommodate two million tons of trash annually, the city would save about $119 million dollars per year and combined greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by 240,000 metric tons per year.

Almost immediately, environmental justice advocates began protesting, saying the writing on the wall leaned toward a WTE process called thermal processing, which many feel is a fancy code for incineration. The New York Public Interest Research Group reacted to the RFP's announcement by organizing protests and labeling thermal processing as unsafe, unproven and inequitable to communities of color.

Worries about impact on recycling, neighborhoods

The advocates also feel strongly that devoting resources to WTE technology will take away from recycling efforts, where New York lags, ranking 16th out of 27 major U.S. cities in a recent survey. San Francisco, which recycles 77 percent of its household waste, ranked first in the nation, while New York recycled only 15.4 percent in 2011.

"That's just disgraceful," said Eddie Bautista, executive director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance. "How can it be that with all the wealth and technology available to this city that we can't manage to do better than we're doing today?"

Bautista also worries about who'll be affected most if the city locates a thermal processing facility within the five boroughs: "There are only so many neighborhoods zoned for this type of activity. They're typically located in low-income communities and they're already over-burdened with industrial polluters."

Bautista took part in a protest back in April when city officials took prospective bidders on a tour of potential sites, including the Fresh Kills landfill. And he was not alone.

"We've suffered enough out here and we've suffered disproportionately," said City Councilman Vincent Ignizio of Staten Island at a September meeting of the council's Solid Waste and Sanitation Committee. "When Robert Moses opened Fresh Kills in 1948 it was only supposed to be for three years. It took 50-plus years for us to finally get it closed, and toward the end we were the only dumping ground for all the city's garbage." Ignizio added that he grew up within smelling distance of Fresh Kills and remembers many nights sleeping in his parents' bedroom because they had the only air conditioner which could mask the odor of the dump.

The outcry from residents and Staten Island elected officials was loud enough that the Bloomberg administration removed the entire borough of Staten Island from consideration in the RFP. But the other boroughs are still in the mix.

Technology has defenders

Proponents of WTE technology argue that thermal processing is a form of recycling and that new technologies and EPA regulations have eliminated the odor and air pollution many people connect with the process of incinerating trash. Professor Nickolas J. Themelis, director of the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University, said he thinks that much of the opposition to creating WTE plants in the city stems from people's memories of the bad old days.

"At one point New York had 30 municipal incinerators and about 15,000 residential incinerators with no regulation at all. It was a mess," said Themelis. "There is this kind of animus among people who have been exposed to incinerators in the past. They associate them with black smoke and horrific pollution. But the truth is, those are all gone now. The pollution generated by trucking waste to landfills can't compare to how little a modern WTE facility produces. The people who oppose these technologies are like the Flat Earth Society, they are holding back progress."

Themelis recently completed work on a large collaborative study for the Inter-American Development Bank to recommend the best WTE technology for waste management in Latin America. "Regrettably, we came to the conclusion that the technology we use now is the best to use. Over the past decades roughly 125 plants have been built around the world using thermal combustion … with increasingly strict emissions standards. The data we have collected is, I think, unassailable. These systems produce far less emissions than landfilling."

There are currently 10 WTE facilities statewide licensed by the Department of Environmental Conservation to burn municipal waste and convert it into steam and electricity. One is located in Peekskill, about 50 miles up the Hudson River. The facility is owned by Wheelabrator, a subsidiary of Waste Management, the country's largest waste processor, which serves more than 20 million residential, commercial and municipal customers nationwide.

The Peekskill facility processes approximately 700,000 tons of waste per year, or about 95 percent of the household trash generated by Westchester County, according to Operations Manager Brett Baker. Three, nine-story tall boilers burn about 2,250 tons of pre-recycled trash per day, using the trash as fuel. The heat (over 2,000-degrees Fahrenheit) drives a turbine which generates electricity—60 megawatts of electricity per hour.—which is sold to Con Edison via a direct feed to its grid. The ash is cooled and sifted for recyclable metal and the remains, about 10 percent of the initial volume, are sent to landfills. The emissions are forced through a series of filtering systems until they are below state and federal guidelines for pollutants, then released through one large stack.

"We have about a 90 percent reduction rate in the waste stream," Baker told a reporter in September. "And as you can tell when you drove up here, we burn clean. There's virtually no odor at all coming out of the stack and everything is well within EPA guidelines." Waste Management officials claim they operate enough WTE facilities across the U.S. to power 1 million homes and they expect to double that output by 2020.

Of course, not everyone shares a rosy outlook on the plant. A December 2010 report by the Peekskill Environmental Justice Council identified the facility as, "A major source of air pollution." A state permit issued in March 2012 listed the wide ranges of toxic pollutants the plant is permitted to release, including up to 10 tons per year each of dioxins, mercury, arsenic, lead and cadmium.

Newer technologies and emissions controls were recently approved at a facility run by one of the likely bidders for the NYC contract, Covanta Energy, which currently burns some of New York's trash for $66 per ton at its facility in Newark. Environmental activists believe those changes would not have been made without public pressure. Industry analysts point out that waste processors are trying to find an economic "sweet spot," where new technology implementation costs don't swallow up potential profits.

Searching for viable options

New York's RFP identified several different WTE technologies that companies could propose besides thermal incineration—like plasma gasification, hydrolysis and anaerobic digestion.

In early September The New York Times profiled a non-profit company with a plasma gasification facility in Florida, one that burns municipal waste at more than 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit then electrifies it. The promoters of the technology claim the process breaks down the chemical bonds of carcinogenic material like PCB's, asbestos and medical waste, rendering them harmless without creating dioxin or other harmful byproducts. But opponents point out that pushing such technology will hinder recycling and the development of ecologically friendly products and policies. Others point out that the plasma gasification consumes roughly half the energy it creates to feed its own power requirements. 

The other technologies in the city's RFP, anaerobic digestion and hydrolysis, deal mainly with organic materials and would only handle a small percentage of the city's waste, meaning thermal processing might be the most effective alternative to landfilling.

Proponents of the technology point to several European cities like Vienna, Paris and Copenhagen which have built thermal processing WTE facilities inside their city limits and incorporated them into the cityscape.

But critics like the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives say the higher a country's incineration rate, the lower its recycling rate. The group released a report tracking waste treatment strategies across the 27-member European Union. According to the report, while Denmark had the highest rate of WTE incineration at 54 percent of the country's total waste stream, it only recycled 23 percent. "It is necessary to implement a system that reduces waste generation, reuses and recycles waste, and phases out both incineration and landfilling," the report concluded.

On Oct. 5 San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee announced that the city had reached an 80 percent landfill diversion rate through aggressive recycling, reuse and composting initiatives making it the "greenest" city in North America and moving it closer to the goal of "zero waste"—a target of which Themelis is skeptical.

"There are people who talk about ‘zero waste,' but zero waste is not a reality, it's a fantasy. True, we should recycle as much as is practical, but you cannot neglect that you must do something with what can't be recycled."Themelis added that America's comfort level with landfill arises partially from an excess of open space that few other countries enjoy. "New York City sends 100,000 truckloads of landfill out of state every year, but sooner or later the state borders will be closed, that's not going away."

According to recent EPA data, there are currently 87 facilities in the U.S. burning trash to generate electricity. The combined output of these facilities amounts to approximately 2,500 megawatts, or 0.3 of total national power generation. The agency cites the high construction cost of such facilities as one reason that the public will and financing to build them has been lacking.

It's unclear if the city's fiscal challenge and growing concern about its carbon footprint will create the political support necessary for WTE in New York. Councilwoman Letitia James, who chairs the Sanitation and Solid Waste Committee, said she supports the RFP initiative, but under the conditions that minority communities are not disproportionately impacted and the economics make good sense. "I'm open to examining it," said James during a recent interview. "Not necessarily supporting it, but examining it. Because there's just no way we can continue to afford to ship millions of tons of garbage out of the state." 

http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/4638/fiscal-woes-long-held-fears-spur-waste-to-energy-debate

Fuel From Waste, Poised at a Milestone

By MATTHEW L. WALD

NY Times

11/13/12

WASHINGTON — For years, scientists and engineers have been juggling various combinations of acids, steam, bacteria, catalysts and the digestive juices of microorganisms to convert agricultural waste and even household garbage into motor fuel.

So far, such alternative fuels have not moved beyond small pilot plants, despite federal incentives to encourage companies to develop them.

But that could be about to change.

Officials at two companies that have built multimillion-dollar factories say they are very close to beginning large-scale, commercial production of these so-called cellulosic biofuels, and others are predicting success in the months to come.

In Columbus, Miss., KiOR has spent more than $200 million on a plant that is supposed to mix shredded wood waste with a patented catalyst, powdered to talcumlike consistency. Its process does in a few seconds what takes nature millions of years: removes the oxygen from the biomass and converts the other main ingredients, hydrogen and carbon, into molecules that can then be processed into gasoline and diesel fuel.

KiOR aims to turn out 13 million gallons of fuel a year and has already lined up three companies to buy its output, including FedEx and a joint venture of Weyerhauser and Chevron. KiOR said on Thursday that it had begun producing what it called “renewable crude” and intended to refine that into gasoline and diesel that it would begin shipping by the end of the month.

And Ineos, a European oil and chemical company, is putting the final touches on a plant in Vero Beach, Fla., that would cook wood and woody garbage until they broke down into tiny molecules of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Those molecules would be pumped into a giant steel tank, where bacteria would eat them and excrete ethanol. The company has spent $130 million on the plant, which is supposed to make eight million gallons a year, about 1 percent of Florida’s ethanol demand. The plant is next to a county landfill, and executives covet the incoming garbage.

Both plants are far smaller than typical oil refineries, but commercial production at either one — or at any of several of the plants that are a step behind them — would be a major milestone in renewable energy.

At such plants, the goal is sometimes to make ethanol and sometimes gasoline or diesel fuel or their ingredients. The pathways to make the biofuels are varied. But the feedstocks have something in common: they are derived from plants and trees, but not from food crops like corn kernels, which are the basis of most of the biofuel currently made in the United States.

Often, the raw ingredients for the cellulosic biofuels are the wastes of farms, paper mills or households, with a value that is low or even negative, meaning people will pay the fuel producers to dispose of them. And the companies developing the new fuels say that their products produce far fewer carbon emissions than petroleum-based gasoline and diesel.

KiOR says that its fuel will release one-sixth the amount of carbon dioxide as an equivalent amount of petroleum fuel. That is mostly because every tree or woody plant fed into its process will eventually be replaced by a new tree or plant, which will suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And a byproduct of its factory is surplus electricity, which will be exported to the grid, displacing electricity that would otherwise be generated from natural gas or coal.

Ineos goes a step further, saying its production process actually reduces the overall amount of carbon in the atmosphere. “We could make the argument that we’re carbon-negative,” said Peter Williams, the chief executive. The reason, he said, is that electricity produced from its plant averts emissions that would have come from other electricity sources.

Just becoming the first company to produce commercial volumes of these alternative biofuels is no guarantee of commercial success. That depends on further optimizing production processes to get more gallons of fuel per ton of raw materials at lower operating costs.

Industry officials say that profits also depend on continued high prices for oil, the commodity that biofuels would replace, and a continuation of a federal government mandate that requires fuel blenders to mix a certain percentage of biofuels into the gasoline sold at service stations.

“Sustainability requires good economics,” Mr. Williams said.

Many companies have produced biofuel successfully, but only in quantities characteristic of a factory that makes fine whisky or perhaps perfume. The trick is to get reliability up and costs down to a level that allows operation on a large scale.

Government policy has anticipated far more technical progress than the industry has made. Congress set a goal of 250 million gallons of cellulosic biofuel for 2011 and 500 million gallons for this year, but the Environmental Protection Agency cut the requirement to six million gallons for 2012 because of the lack of commercial production.

Six governors, oil refiners and companies hurt by high corn prices have asked the agency to waive its requirements for ethanol and other renewable fuels. Some single out the corn ethanol mandate, but others want the quota for cellulosic fuels waived, too, partly because there is no actual production.

The cellulosic biofuel industry has asked the E.P.A. to keep all the rules intact. Waiving the rule for corn ethanol would discourage investment in advanced biofuels as well, said Brent Erickson, a spokesman for BIO, a trade organization. “You can’t de-link them,” he said.

The agency was expected to rule on Tuesday, but instead said it would rule “shortly.” To grant the waiver, it would have to find severe harm to the economy. Energy experts say that eventually renewable motor fuel could have a much bigger impact on the United States economy than renewable electricity from wind farms or solar cells. Renewable electricity saves coal and natural gas, which are cheap and domestically plentiful. Renewable motor fuel displaces oil, which is much more expensive and often imported, which poses a host of national security and trade issues.

If either Ineos or KiOR began commercial production, it would break a long string of overly optimistic promises made by the industry and the government.

In October 1998, for example, the Energy Department showed off a plant in Jennings, La., that made ethanol from sugar cane wastes; the department said it would reach commercial production within a few years. At the time the plant was owned by a government-subsidized firm called BC International, which was later reorganized and renamed Celunol. Then it was taken over by Verenium, which, with backing from BP, tried another method. BP announced on Oct. 25 that it was dropping plans for a commercial plant based on technology piloted at Jennings, although it still does research there.

Mascoma, based in Cambridge, Mass., and backed by General Motors and Khosla Ventures, among others, is trying to make ethanol from wood waste. Samir Kaul, a board member representing Khosla, confidently predicted in 2006 that it would be in commercial production by 2008, but that goal remains elusive.

Iogen, an established Canadian producer of enzymes, began producing ethanol from wheat straw in 2004, and said in the fall of 2005 that it hoped to announce plans for a commercial plant by the end of that year. Eventually, it announced plans for a plant in southern Manitoba, but in April of this year it dropped that idea, and laid off some workers at its Ottawa headquarters.

But new chemistry technology, like hope, springs eternal.

POET, a major producer of ethanol by conventional means, is building a plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa, that is supposed to digest 700 tons of corn cobs a day and feed the resulting sugars into a conventional ethanol plant next door. The goal of the project, which is supposed to be ready by late 2013, is to produce 20 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol a year.

Abengoa, a Spanish firm, has been running a pilot plant in Salamanca, Spain, and in June 2011, broke ground on a $350 million commercial plant in Hugoton, Kan., that is now 50 percent complete, according to Manuel Sanchez Ortega, the chief executive. It is currently slated to open in the third quarter of next year and is supposed to make 25 million gallons of ethanol a year from agricultural waste, wood waste and nonfood crops.

And a variety of smaller companies are a step behind.

The holy grail is to find a way to profitably make renewable fuels from otherwise wasted biomass, as opposed to valuable food crops.

“If we can do it with biomass, then there is no more discussion of food versus fuel; it’s over,” Mr. Ortega said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/business/energy-environment/alternative-fuels-long-delayed-promise-might-be-near-fruition.html?hpw

Fiscal Woes, Long-Held Fears Spur Waste-to-Energy Debate

New York is thinking about diverting garbage from out-of-state landfills and using it to generate electricity locally. The plan pits concerns about city spending and carbon emissions against fears of environmental injustice.

By Bill Hughes
City Limits Magazine

In the years since a tugboat nosed the last barge full of garbage into the massive Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island when it was officially closed back in March of 2001, the tax burden and environmental impact of dealing with New York City's trash have increased dramatically. City officials estimate that in a single year, tractor-trailers log 40 million miles to haul 3 million tons of trash from the five boroughs to out-of-state landfills, mostly in Pennsylvania and Virginia. The flat cost of shipping trash to landfills has risen from $62 per ton in 2001 to $92 per ton last year. A recent report by the Citizen's Budget Commission concluded that, "The waste that New York City sends to landfills generates about 679,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases per year – the equivalent of adding more than 133,000 cars to the roads."

To address the growing problem, Mayor Michael Bloomberg included a partial solution in his 30-year master plan for the city, PlaNYC, which calls for the construction of a new Waste-to-Energy (WTE) facility to process trash that cannot be recycled. A Request for Proposals (RFP) was issued in March of 2012 to the private sector to build a facility, "…using reliable, cost-effective, sustainable and environmentally sound waste to clean energy technology."

Among the requirements in the RFP was a mandate that the pilot facility be located either in the five boroughs or within an 80-mile radius of the city. It would have to begin by processing 450 tons per day, with the city making no capital investment but paying a tipping fee once it starts sending trash. The 450-ton per day capacity would have to double if the pilot is successful. The bid went out in March, applications were due by June 5th and the award was supposed to be announced in early September. A Bloomberg spokesman last week said the proposals were still under review and an announcement might be made in November. The administration estimates that over 30 years if expanded facilities could accommodate two million tons of trash annually, the city would save about $119 million dollars per year and combined greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by 240,000 metric tons per year.

Almost immediately, environmental justice advocates began protesting, saying the writing on the wall leaned toward a WTE process called thermal processing, which many feel is a fancy code for incineration. The New York Public Interest Research Group reacted to the RFP's announcement by organizing protests and labeling thermal processing as unsafe, unproven and inequitable to communities of color.

Worries about impact on recycling, neighborhoods

The advocates also feel strongly that devoting resources to WTE technology will take away from recycling efforts, where New York lags, ranking 16th out of 27 major U.S. cities in a recent survey. San Francisco, which recycles 77 percent of its household waste, ranked first in the nation, while New York recycled only 15.4 percent in 2011.

"That's just disgraceful," said Eddie Bautista, executive director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance. "How can it be that with all the wealth and technology available to this city that we can't manage to do better than we're doing today?"

Bautista also worries about who'll be affected most if the city locates a thermal processing facility within the five boroughs: "There are only so many neighborhoods zoned for this type of activity. They're typically located in low-income communities and they're already over-burdened with industrial polluters."

Bautista took part in a protest back in April when city officials took prospective bidders on a tour of potential sites, including the Fresh Kills landfill. And he was not alone.

"We've suffered enough out here and we've suffered disproportionately," said City Councilman Vincent Ignizio of Staten Island at a September meeting of the council's Solid Waste and Sanitation Committee. "When Robert Moses opened Fresh Kills in 1948 it was only supposed to be for three years. It took 50-plus years for us to finally get it closed, and toward the end we were the only dumping ground for all the city's garbage." Ignizio added that he grew up within smelling distance of Fresh Kills and remembers many nights sleeping in his parents' bedroom because they had the only air conditioner which could mask the odor of the dump.

The outcry from residents and Staten Island elected officials was loud enough that the Bloomberg administration removed the entire borough of Staten Island from consideration in the RFP. But the other boroughs are still in the mix.

Technology has defenders

Proponents of WTE technology argue that thermal processing is a form of recycling and that new technologies and EPA regulations have eliminated the odor and air pollution many people connect with the process of incinerating trash. Professor Nickolas J. Themelis, director of the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University, said he thinks that much of the opposition to creating WTE plants in the city stems from people's memories of the bad old days.

"At one point New York had 30 municipal incinerators and about 15,000 residential incinerators with no regulation at all. It was a mess," said Themelis. "There is this kind of animus among people who have been exposed to incinerators in the past. They associate them with black smoke and horrific pollution. But the truth is, those are all gone now. The pollution generated by trucking waste to landfills can't compare to how little a modern WTE facility produces. The people who oppose these technologies are like the Flat Earth Society, they are holding back progress."

Themelis recently completed work on a large collaborative study for the Inter-American Development Bank to recommend the best WTE technology for waste management in Latin America. "Regrettably, we came to the conclusion that the technology we use now is the best to use. Over the past decades roughly 125 plants have been built around the world using thermal combustion … with increasingly strict emissions standards. The data we have collected is, I think, unassailable. These systems produce far less emissions than landfilling."

There are currently 10 WTE facilities statewide licensed by the Department of Environmental Conservation to burn municipal waste and convert it into steam and electricity. One is located in Peekskill, about 50 miles up the Hudson River. The facility is owned by Wheelabrator, a subsidiary of Waste Management, the country's largest waste processor, which serves more than 20 million residential, commercial and municipal customers nationwide.

The Peekskill facility processes approximately 700,000 tons of waste per year, or about 95 percent of the household trash generated by Westchester County, according to Operations Manager Brett Baker. Three, nine-story tall boilers burn about 2,250 tons of pre-recycled trash per day, using the trash as fuel. The heat (over 2,000-degrees Fahrenheit) drives a turbine which generates electricity—60 megawatts of electricity per hour.—which is sold to Con Edison via a direct feed to its grid. The ash is cooled and sifted for recyclable metal and the remains, about 10 percent of the initial volume, are sent to landfills. The emissions are forced through a series of filtering systems until they are below state and federal guidelines for pollutants, then released through one large stack.

"We have about a 90 percent reduction rate in the waste stream," Baker told a reporter in September. "And as you can tell when you drove up here, we burn clean. There's virtually no odor at all coming out of the stack and everything is well within EPA guidelines." Waste Management officials claim they operate enough WTE facilities across the U.S. to power 1 million homes and they expect to double that output by 2020.

Of course, not everyone shares a rosy outlook on the plant. A December 2010 report by the Peekskill Environmental Justice Council identified the facility as, "A major source of air pollution." A state permit issued in March 2012 listed the wide ranges of toxic pollutants the plant is permitted to release, including up to 10 tons per year each of dioxins, mercury, arsenic, lead and cadmium.

Newer technologies and emissions controls were recently approved at a facility run by one of the likely bidders for the NYC contract, Covanta Energy, which currently burns some of New York's trash for $66 per ton at its facility in Newark. Environmental activists believe those changes would not have been made without public pressure. Industry analysts point out that waste processors are trying to find an economic "sweet spot," where new technology implementation costs don't swallow up potential profits.

Searching for viable options

New York's RFP identified several different WTE technologies that companies could propose besides thermal incineration—like plasma gasification, hydrolysis and anaerobic digestion.

In early September The New York Times profiled a non-profit company with a plasma gasification facility in Florida, one that burns municipal waste at more than 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit then electrifies it. The promoters of the technology claim the process breaks down the chemical bonds of carcinogenic material like PCB's, asbestos and medical waste, rendering them harmless without creating dioxin or other harmful byproducts. But opponents point out that pushing such technology will hinder recycling and the development of ecologically friendly products and policies. Others point out that the plasma gasification consumes roughly half the energy it creates to feed its own power requirements. 
The other technologies in the city's RFP, anaerobic digestion and hydrolysis, deal mainly with organic materials and would only handle a small percentage of the city's waste, meaning thermal processing might be the most effective alternative to landfilling.

Proponents of the technology point to several European cities like Vienna, Paris and Copenhagen which have built thermal processing WTE facilities inside their city limits and incorporated them into the cityscape.

But critics like the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives say the higher a country's incineration rate, the lower its recycling rate. The group released a report tracking waste treatment strategies across the 27-member European Union. According to the report, while Denmark had the highest rate of WTE incineration at 54 percent of the country's total waste stream, it only recycled 23 percent. "It is necessary to implement a system that reduces waste generation, reuses and recycles waste, and phases out both incineration and landfilling," the report concluded.

On Oct. 5 San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee announced that the city had reached an 80 percent landfill diversion rate through aggressive recycling, reuse and composting initiatives making it the "greenest" city in North America and moving it closer to the goal of "zero waste"—a target of which Themelis is skeptical.

"There are people who talk about ‘zero waste,' but zero waste is not a reality, it's a fantasy. True, we should recycle as much as is practical, but you cannot neglect that you must do something with what can't be recycled."Themelis added that America's comfort level with landfill arises partially from an excess of open space that few other countries enjoy. "New York City sends 100,000 truckloads of landfill out of state every year, but sooner or later the state borders will be closed, that's not going away."

According to recent EPA data, there are currently 87 facilities in the U.S. burning trash to generate electricity. The combined output of these facilities amounts to approximately 2,500 megawatts, or 0.3 of total national power generation. The agency cites the high construction cost of such facilities as one reason that the public will and financing to build them has been lacking.

It's unclear if the city's fiscal challenge and growing concern about its carbon footprint will create the political support necessary for WTE in New York. Councilwoman Letitia James, who chairs the Sanitation and Solid Waste Committee, said she supports the RFP initiative, but under the conditions that minority communities are not disproportionately impacted and the economics make good sense. "I'm open to examining it," said James during a recent interview. "Not necessarily supporting it, but examining it. Because there's just no way we can continue to afford to ship millions of tons of garbage out of the state." 

http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/4638/fiscal-woes-long-held-fears-spur-waste-to-energy-debate

Plasma Gasification Raises Hopes of Clean Energy From Garbage

By RANDY LEONARD

NY Times

September 11, 2012

David Robau tours the country promoting a system that sounds too good to be true: It devours municipal garbage, recycles metals, blasts toxic contaminants and produces electricity and usable byproducts — all with drastic reductions in emissions.

Mr. Robau, an environmental scientist for the Air Force, has been promoting a method that was developed with the Air Force to dispose of garbage with neither the harmful byproducts of conventional incineration nor the environmental impact of transporting and burying waste. It is one of several innovative techniques that the United States military has been researching to provide alternatives to the open-pit burns that some veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars say have made them ill.

Already some waste companies and cities like New York have shown an interest in technology similar to what Mr. Robau has been promoting, known as plasma arc gasification. Proponents say the process can break chemical bonds and destroy medical waste, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), asbestos and hydrocarbons, some of which can be hazardous if disposed of in landfills or traditional mass-burn incinerators.

Still, some environmentalists are leery. They say the ability to fully dispose of waste will discourage recycling and the development of renewable products, and the gasification will still result in toxic substances like dioxins.

Mr. Robau maintains that the process is earth-friendly. “This is not incineration,” he said. “This is gasification, so it’s a lot cleaner, a lot better for the environment.”

Mr. Robau, who also heads a nonprofit organization based in Gulf Breeze, Fla., has overseen testing of the small-scale plasma arc gasification system, which cracks complex molecules into simple elements using energy as intense as the sun’s surface, making fuel for about 350 kilowatts of electricity from about 10 tons of garbage each day, enough to run the system.

The system has been hard at work in a 6,400-square-foot building at Hurlburt Field Air Force base in Florida’s panhandle. A mechanical shredder cuts household garbage into pieces no bigger than two inches. An airtight auger feeds the waste into an oxygen-poor gasification chamber, where temperatures reach more than 9,000 degrees.

In an instant, wood disintegrates, plastics turn to gas. Bits of metal and glass fall into a molten pool.

From two graphite electrodes, an arc of electricity leaps about a foot to the molten slag, producing a cloud of ionized particles known as plasma, which heats the chamber. Most heavier metals settle to the bottom of the pool, below a layer of liquid silica and other oxides. The metals are removed, cooled and used for steel or other products.

“Effectively, 100 percent of all the metals on the base are being recycled,” Mr. Robau said.

The liquid oxides are removed and form a glassy solid when cooled. The slag traps contaminants like errant lead molecules and other heavy metals in a vitreous matrix that takes up 1 percent of the volume of the original waste, Mr. Robau said, a tenth of the volume left over after traditional incineration.

The vitrified component meets standards for disposal and may even be suitable for use as a construction aggregate, according to Mr. Robau and other industry professionals.

In the chamber, organic gases break down into hydrogen and carbon monoxide — the components of a fuel called synthesis gas, or syngas — which exits the furnace.

The gas passes through a plasma torch polisher, which breaks down remaining complex molecules and soot.

Injected water cools the syngas to less than 200 degrees. The extreme temperature of the plasma followed by quick cooling inhibits the formation of dioxins and furans (another organic compound), according to Mr. Robau and other industry experts.

The lack of dioxin creation would be a benefit over traditional incinerators and other types of gasifiers, in which lower temperatures and incomplete burning result in toxic compounds.

Emissions rules forced a 99 percent cut in dioxin and furan emissions and a 96 percent reduction in mercury from traditional incinerators between 1990 and 2005, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. However, companies have to dispose of the toxic ash filtered from mass-burn facilities.

After water quenches the gas in the Hurlburt system, stripping processes produce sodium bisulfate and hydrochloric acid, which can be sold, Mr. Robau said.

The gas passes through three types of filters to catch remaining impurities. The resulting syngas is as clean or cleaner than natural gas, and the system produces less than half the nitrogen oxides and 5 percent of the sulfur oxides and mercury of a traditional incinerator, Mr. Robau said. The Air Force uses the syngas to produce enough electricity to power the system.

Companies have used plasma arc technology in steel refining for more than a century. Some small-scale plasma gasifiers are specialized to process materials like asbestos or medical waste.

In Japan, a plasma facility originally designed to zap residue from automobile shredding now handles up to 150 tons of municipal solid waste each day in the city of Utashinai. And construction on a plant of similar size, designed to process industrial waste and wood chips, wrapped up this summer in Morcenx, in southern France.

Companies have been eying plasma gasification of municipal waste with eager hopes, but until recently financing has lagged. Plasma facilities are expensive, and the energy-hungry arcs and torches can consume half of the generated electricity. On the other hand, the systems can also handle medical and hazardous waste, which can command two to four times the fees associated with municipal waste.

“The problem has been over the years trying to find that economic sweet spot,” said Joe Vaillancourt, who evaluates newer technologies for Waste Management, a $15.4 billion company with headquarters in Texas.

In the past five years, with increased interest in energy independence and sustainability, venture capitalists and companies have financed testing of small-scale systems, including a 25-ton system built and run by InEnTec in Arlington, Ore., Mr. Vaillancourt said. Waste Management now holds an equity stake in InEnTec.

Last month the Agriculture Department announced a conditional $105 million loan guarantee for Fulcrum BioEnergy to build a much larger system outside Reno, Nev. It will use three InEnTec plasma melters to process 400 tons of garbage a day, an unprecedented scale for a plasma municipal waste facility, said Mr. Vaillancourt and others in the industry. Fulcrum plans to create ethanol from the syngas, and expects the Reno plant to be running in 2014.

New York City, too, is looking for innovative technology to deal with some of the city’s waste. In March, the Bloomberg administration requested proposals to build a facility that would use newer techniques like plasma gasification or anaerobic digestion to process as much as 900 tons of garbage a day.

“New Yorkers want their trash to be handled in an environmentally friendly way,” said Caswell F. Holloway, deputy mayor for operations. “Anything would be better than putting it in the ground.” The city is reviewing the proposals.

Still, some environmental groups, like the Sierra Club and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, lump these techniques in with traditional incinerators, claiming that they still produce dioxin. They also oppose renewable energy credits for these facilities.

Allen Hershkowitz, a scientist with the National Resources Defense Council, said he believed there was a place for waste-to-energy operations, but only after recycling and composting programs had been maximized.

He said he still believed that communities could reach recycling rates of 60 to 70 percent. In his view it is premature for a city like New York, with a recycling rate of about 15 percent, to be considering setting up a new waste facility. “They’re not even at the point where they should be thinking about waste-to-energy,” Mr. Hershkowitz said

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/science/plasma-gasification-raises-hopes-of-clean-energy-from-garbage.html?pagewanted=all

TEG wins EPC contract for London’s first anaerobic digester

By Erin Voegele | September 05, 2012

Biomass Magazine

Work to develop London’s first anaerobic digestion (AD) facility is underway. The TEG Group recently announced it has secured funding to construct a £21 million ($33.4 million) organic waste facility at East London’s Dagenham Dock, including an AD plant.

The TEG Group PLC signed an engineering, procurement and construction contract to construct and operate the plant, and was awarded a 15-year operating and maintenance contract. Construction on the facility is set to begin in September. The project is currently scheduled to be operational during the first quarter of 2014.

In addition, gas-to-power producer Alkane Energy plc was selected as a project subcontractor, and will provide the gas-to-power capabilities at the proposed biogas project. Information released by Alkane Energy notes that the capital contract is worth £1.6 million ($2.5 million). In addition, the company has signed a 15-year maintenance contract.

According to information released by The TEG Group, the plant will be capable of processing 49,000 tons of biomass each year, including a 30,000 ton-per-year AD plant and a 19,000 ton-per-year in-vessel composting (IVC) plant. Biogas produced at the plant will be used to generate approximately 1.4 MW of power. The project will also produce more than 36,000 tons of digestate per year, along with 14,000 tons of compost.

Once complete, the project will take in a variety of feedstocks, including separated food waste. It will also process mixed food and green waste produced by local households, commercial and manufacturing operations.

 The plant will be located on a 4.7 acre site within the London Sustainable Industries Park. The Foresight Group has committed £11 million ($17.5 million) in funding to support the project, through the Foresight Environmental Fund and Foresight’s U.K. Waste Resources and Energy Investments Fund. The London Green Fund, which was launched by the London mayor’s office in 2011, was a cornerstone in the development of the FEF. The London Waste and Recycling Board and Investec Bank plc also provided the project with £7.9 million ($12.6 million) in senior debt financing. 

http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/8043/teg-wins-epc-contract-for-londonundefineds-first-anaerobic-digester

Lunch, Landfills and What I Tossed

By MIREYA NAVARRO

New York Times

Published: October 21, 2011

IT was warm and sunny on a recent Tuesday and the lunchtime crowd in Bryant Park was in full swarm. Hundreds of Midtown workers sat on the grass or at round outdoor tables sunbathing, talking on cellphones and typing away on laptops.

But mostly they ate — sushi, pizza, chicken pesto salads, turkey club sandwiches — and much of their food came in plastic containers that had no place to go but into the trash.

 As any befuddled, frustrated and guilt-ridden environmentally conscious New Yorker knows, takeout food and its containers — salad bar and deli clamshells; plastic cups and utensils; yogurt containers; fancy three-compartment bento boxes — are the bane of this city’s would-be recyclers.  They might reuse plastic shopping bags until they rip and religiously bundle every newspaper and magazine for recycling pickup, only to be undone by lunch.

 “There’s nothing I can do,” said Doug Richardson, 25, an accountant eating a chicken salad from a deep plastic bowl. “It annoys me. It’s plastic in a landfill.”

 Environmental advocates call recycling the weak link in the city’s green agenda, even after legislation was passed last year to overhaul the 1989 recycling law that made New York a 20th-century leader, not a laggard.

  How far behind is the city? A survey by the Natural Resources Defense Council this year found that more than two dozen large and medium-size cities in the United States recycle all kinds of plastic containers, while New York takes only bottles and jugs. Another study this year, sponsored by Siemens AG, the global electronics and electrical engineering company, ranked New York 16th among 27 cities in its handling of waste, though it was third in overall environmental performance.

By now, other cities require recyclable or compostable takeout containers and utensils at restaurants — and bins in which to dispose of them. Cutting-edge green cities, like San Francisco, offer curbside collection of food scraps and compostable items at homes, restaurants and offices. And dozens of places now charge residents for their trash by weight to promote recycling and keep refuse out of landfills.

 New York, meanwhile, is going backward: it now recycles about 15 percent of the waste collected by the Sanitation Department, which is primarily from residences, down from a peak of 23 percent in 2001. And while city officials have said they are reviewing so-called “pay as you throw” systems, there is no indication that the city might adopt one.

  “This issue is simply not getting the attention it deserves,” said Eric A. Goldstein, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. “They’ve treated their recycling operation like the after-school clarinet program.”

 Environmental advocates suspect a lack of commitment from City Hall. After all, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has tackled idling trucks, dirty boilers and even smokers who foul the air, but in 2002, to save money, he temporarily cut back on curbside collection of recyclables.

Caswell Holloway, Mr. Bloomberg’s new deputy mayor for operations and a former commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, said, however, that while recycling faced significant hurdles, a lack of commitment was not one of them.

“The mayor recognizes that a sustainable New York City means that we need to come up with ways to deal with waste,” Mr. Holloway said. “The clock is running on landfills.”

That said, he added, “We could do better.”

We all could. The amount of nonrecyclable waste generated by just one New Yorker can be stunning, as I found out. Saving all the packaging from a week’s worth of takeout food, I ended up with three plastic yogurt containers, a paper salad box, a paper cereal bowl, two Styrofoam plates, one plastic salad-dressing container and seven plastic food containers — the rigid ones with snap-on lids. Also, five plastic cups (each with a plastic straw), a paper cup with a plastic lid, a plastic water bottle and a plain old paper cup (it held milk for my cereal). Also, one plastic fork, one plastic knife and two compostable plastic spoons, which I threw out rather than composting.

And to carry all that food I used three paper trays and a handful of plastic bags.

But change is on the way, Mr. Holloway said. To increase recycling capacity, the city has entered into long-term contracts and is building new infrastructure, like a 100,000-square-foot recycling plant at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park. At the same time, he said, a recently convened team from the Sanitation Department, the mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, the Office of Recycling Outreach and Education, and his office is looking at how to divert more waste from landfills.

They’ve got their work cut out for them.

NEW YORK CITY produces more than 14 million tons of waste a year, and city officials say that roughly half of it is recycled. But most of that is dirt from the construction and demolition industry, which accounts for half of all solid waste.

Recycling efforts are less successful in the two categories that account for the other half of the city’s waste: trash collected from businesses and commercial buildings, which use private haulers to handle it, and residential, government and institutional customers served by the Sanitation Department.

One issue is behavior. City officials say residents sort less than half of all materials that could be recycled; most items are improperly discarded in the trash. Both convenient recycling and the tracking of scofflaws are daunting because of the nature of housing in the city — tall multifamily buildings with large numbers of occupants. (And many residents blame confusing recycling rules.)

The city has less information on commercial recycling, but officials say most businesses, too, are not capturing as much as they could for recycling.

Last year, the City Council passed legislation to require the recycling of rigid plastics — all those containers for yogurt or Chinese takeout, as well as others like medicine bottles and flower pots — and divert 8,000 more tons of plastic from landfills and incinerators each year. But that expansion hinges not just on the opening of the new recycling plant, but also on an assessment of costs.

Still, city officials say that it is more expensive to recycle than to send trash to landfills and incinerators for disposal, and that they have to weigh those costs against environmental goals.

The city also has to give people somewhere to put their recyclables, especially out on the streets. With the heaviest pedestrian traffic in the country, New York has only 500 recycling bins on streets and in parks, compared with about 25,000 wastebaskets. Sanitation Department officials say that to keep costs down, they place the bins mostly in areas along existing collection routes, where volunteers from the community help by replacing and storing bags when they fill up. The new recycling laws approved by the City Council last year call for an expansion, but only to 1,000 recycling bins in public spaces — by 2020.

“I used to live in San Francisco, and there were containers for trash, compost, plastic and glass and paper,” said Yana Rachovska, 26, an architect who now lives in Astoria, Queens. “It was citywide. We had no choice.”

Things are even worse underground in the subways and on commuter rail platforms. Two years ago, a blue-ribbon commission convened by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority recommended better and more uniform recycling on subway and train platforms. But not much has changed, some commission members said. And recycling efforts are far from uniform. Metro-North stations, for example, have recycling bins, but Long Island Rail Road stations do not.

Officials of New York City Transit, the agency within the transportation authority that operates the subways and buses, say that the city’s 468 subway stations are too crowded and spread out for extra bins and that the expense of managing them would be prohibitive. The officials said all subway trash was sent to a processing plant in New Jersey to be sorted through, in a system known as post-collection recycling.

Post-collection, however, is considered a less reliable method of recovering materials like paper that can be easily soiled by other trash, and those materials make up half of the recyclables collected at subway stations.

Michael G. Zacchea, the operations officer who oversees “asset recovery” for the transit system, said about half of the waste from the subways was recycled, but environmental groups and some public officials expressed skepticism.

  “There’s just no way that the quality of the paper is going to be usable,” said City Councilwoman Jessica Lappin, a Manhattan Democrat, who has been pressing the transportation authority to provide recycling bins on subway platforms.

“You see everybody getting into the stations with the newspaper and their coffee,” she said. “It drives me crazy.”

The inconsistencies of New York’s recycling test visitors as well. One tourist from Redwood City, Calif., Dawn E. Garcia, wrote on her Facebook page after her visit last summer:

“At the end of an entertaining week as a tourist in New York City, I loved it BUT I have one burning question: Why don’t New Yorkers recycle?”

Ms. Garcia, 52, the deputy director of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University, said she had wanted to throw away a plastic water bottle during a walk to the Museum of Modern Art from her hotel near Grand Central Terminal —  some 15 blocks  —  but could not find a recycling bin along the way.

“I was just surprised how many places don’t have them,” she said. “I’m loath to drop a can or water bottle in the trash, and I was walking a long time with that water bottle.

“When you ask people, they give you this blank stare. ‘Recycling?’ ”

Indeed, one of the major reasons to have recycling bins on streets and in transit hubs is not to divert waste — they capture just a fraction of a city’s total waste stream — but to build the recycling habit and reinforce the message that recyclables are not really garbage.

“It wouldn’t make sense to say, ‘At work and at home you put your recyclables in one bin, but on the street throw everything away,’ ” said Timothy Croll, solid waste director for Seattle Public Utilities. “Then people start to get confused.”

Seattle has 682 public trash cans on its streets, and more than half of those, 351, have a recycling bin for aluminum cans, plastic bottles and paper parked next to them, city officials there said.

In San Francisco, everyone, including people in charge of restaurants and offices, must separate refuse among three bins: recyclables (paper, glass, metal and most plastics), compostables (food scraps, paper food wrappers and yard waste) and trash. San Francisco also bans plastic foam containers for takeout food, and plastic bags at large supermarkets and chain pharmacies. And like dozens of the nation’s largest cities, it has instituted a system that charges residents for the trash they throw out. “A lot of people are motivated by money,” said Juliana Bryant, zero waste coordinator for San Francisco’s Department of the Environment.

And when it comes to composting, New York really lags. In San Francisco, residents dump the contents of their kitchen compost pails into compostable bags and then into green bins for weekly pickup by the city.

 In New York, there is no curbside collection of food scraps, the largest single component of residential waste. Instead, New Yorkers with no backyards who are committed enough to compost typically either freeze their food waste until they can drop it off at a greenmarket or other collection site, or keep worm bins in their homes to do it themselves.

Commercial food waste is an even bigger missed opportunity, city officials said in this year’s progress report of PlaNYC, the mayor’s environmental agenda. About 600,000 tons of food are thrown away each year by restaurants, grocery stores, hotels and other businesses and institutions. The closest facility to process food waste for composting is 150 miles from the city.

The study released this summer by Siemens AG found that while New York trailed only San Francisco and Vancouver in overall green efforts like improving air quality and cutting greenhouse gas emissions, it trailed most other cities in the study in managing waste because it relies primarily on awareness campaigns rather than direct incentives for waste reduction. But environmental groups working to improve recycling rates say any laws must be accompanied by measures to enable people to comply with those laws, simple steps like providing color-coded bins to minimize confusion about where items go, and more costly actions like finding or creating more facilities that can process recyclables.

One such effort is under way in New York by food service chains like Starbucks and Pret A Manger. Under a pilot program with the environmental organization Global Green, the restaurants are collecting soiled coffee cups, sleeves, salad boxes and other paper packaging separately, to test whether they can be recycled.

Annie White, director of the project for Global Green, said results so far were promising — customers were using the right bins, the stores did not find the collections a burden, and many paper mills were interested in the test, though none were actually recycling the materials commercially yet. She said the pilot was expanding to 150 storefronts over the next year, from the initial 10, and was expected to serve as a national model.

“This is material that previously hasn’t been collected,” she said, “but there’s strong demand for fiber.”

RESTAURANTS, of which New York has 24,000, say their customers are demanding more recycling.

The Green Restaurant Association has about 80 certified members in the city, which can earn different star ratings based on their environmental efforts, like reducing energy consumption in dishwashing or hiring companies to compost their food waste.

But collection efforts are still minimal in the “front of the house.” While some chains, like Le Pain Quotidien (a Green Restaurant Association member), compost their own food waste and offer compostable utensils and containers made of recycled paperboard, they do not collect the materials separately, so there is nowhere for these materials to go except the trash bin. There, they will eventually break down and release the greenhouse gas methane along with other organic decay; and they will not be recovered as compost that could be turned into fertilizer.

“A compostable packaging needs to go to a composting facility to be a good environmental choice,” Ms. White said.

Other restaurants are encouraging reuse with discounts and freebies. Just Salad, a New York City chain with seven outlets in Manhattan, sells a special reusable plastic salad bowl for $1 and gives customers two free toppings every time they use it.

Nick Kenner, a managing partner of the chain, said the bowl was a big hit. “One out of four walk-in customers brings back the bowl,” he said.

One of those customers, Stan Shargordosky, 38, a software engineer recently refilling his salad bowl at the West 37th Street store, explained, “I don’t want my plastic bowl to end up in a landfill and take 500 years to decompose.”

Peter Noce, 27, an accountant in Midtown eating a sandwich and carrots with hummus in Bryant Park recently, takes matters into his own hands, bringing food in his own Tupperware plastic container that he takes back home to Long Island for reuse.

“I bring it back, wash it, try to be green,” he said.

Mr. Noce also takes home his plastic water bottles to redeem them for a nickel at the grocery store. “There’s a lot of waste in general. I’m a nonwaster.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/nyregion/on-recycling-nyc-goes-from-leader-to-laggard.html?pagewanted=all

Waste-to-electricity plan draws mixed review in NY

By MIREYA NAVARRO

European Pressphoto AgencyA computer simulation of a new waste-to-energy plant planned in Copenhagen.

One of the new initiatives included in the recently updated version of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s environmental agenda — a plan to solicit proposals to try out new technologies that convert garbage into heat and electricity –- is drawing mixed reviews from environmental groups.

Waste-to-energy technologies are widely used in Europe, but have not caught on in a big way in this country, where most trash still goes to landfills. The Bloomberg administration wants to experiment with two specific technologies — anaerobic digestion and thermal processing – to convert solid waste into either electricity or fuel to reduce the use of landfills and the costs associated with transporting waste to them by truck and rail.

Anaerobic digestion uses microorganisms to break down waste and produce a biogas that can be combusted to generate electricity. Thermal processing uses heat to produce a synthetic gas and produce electricity.

Marcia Bystryn, executive director of the New York League of Conservation Voters, called waste-to-energy plants a plus that produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than the current disposal system. “And you have this twofer,” she added. “You’re creating energy and disposing of waste.”

But groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council say that waste-to-electricity systems are not the best use of resources in New York City, given that it has a recycling rate of less than 20 percent. In Europe, they note, countries like Denmark and Germany that use the technology burn only the trash that cannot be recycled.

“Right now the focus of the Sanitation Department should be on resurrecting the city’s recycling program, finding better ways to handle food and yard waste and making the trash collection system more cost-effective and efficient,” said Eric A. Goldstein, a senior attorney with the council. “They have their hands full.”

PlaNYC, as the city’s environmental plan is known, states that the technologies will be part of a strategy that also envisions “robust” recycling programs. But one program the city has been hoping to expand, the recycling of plastics, may have to wait. Citing limited markets for certain types of plastic, the plan says the city will revisit the expansion of plastics designated for recycling “as markets evolve.”

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/waste-to-electricity-plan-draws-mixed-response-in-n-y/