Published: July 04, 2008 02:53 pm      

VIDEO STORY: Garbage in, electricity out at Covanta

So there I was, on a field trip to the biggest garbage can in Western New York.

I was there to see “municipal solid waste” turned into something valuable, and a pile of refuse so large it would be horrifying if it wasn’t so fascinating.

In the heart of Niagara Falls’ industrial neighborhood, where the architecture is reminiscent of the back of an old radio and corporations have convoluted names like OxyChem and Praxair, lies a 25-acre complex in which household garbage is burned to make electricity.

The Covanta Corporation maintains an energy-from-waste plant here whose centerpiece is a building big enough to park a Boeing 747, except that the floor is a 40-foot-deep pit full of trash bags full of garbage.

Garbage from Kenmore, Tonawanda, Town of Lockport and even some imported from Canada — mostly what gets tossed into the trash at houses in those locales and many others — gets collected by trucks, and the trucks dump it here. Two hundred garbage trucks a day pull in and unload, and bulldozers shovel it all into the pit. The place sees 750,000 tons of trash annually.

The amount of garbage is staggering. Airborne dust refracts the light in the cavernous room, and every sound echoes into noise. Two massive claws —giant-sized versions of the kind used to grab stuffed animals in those arcade games — descend from the ceiling and lift six tons at a time.

Overhead is the “crane cab,” a glass-walled and quiet little room where Angelo Farbo and Mike Thomas, two Covanta employees, sit in upholstered chairs and control the claws with joysticks. Trash bags bulging with used Huggies, scrap paper and who knows what else get lifted, moved across the building and sent to the furnaces.

Those of us with impressionable minds are astounded by the scope of this operation. I’ll never use the phrase “pile of garbage” again without thinking of the mother lode of rubbish on 56th Street. This place should be a tourist attraction: See the Falls, then see what we do with the stuff we “delete” from our lives.

Rich Peers, the facility manager, is more pragmatic about all of this. Here is the enlightened alternative to the landfill, burning it all in furnaces that are attached to turbines, which are attached to generators. The resultant steam is sold to five of Covanta’s industrial neighbors, and the newly made electricity enters National Grid’s grid. What emerges from the Covanta smokestack is nothing but clean carbon dioxide.

While this isn’t the solution to every environmental problem, extracting energy from the contents of your garbage can reduce its volume by 90 percent, which means, according to Peers, “Ten trucks come in, one goes out.” Between 3 and 4 percent of it is metal, and that stuff is isolated in a separate building and sold as scrap.

This is a guy who thinks about garbage in terms of tonnage, not totes.

“For every ton of trash, we’re displacing one ton of greenhouse gases,” he said in a voice that belies his Queens roots.

There is a steady-going vibe to the place. All this is done by 87 people in an atmosphere that feels much like a factory. It’s a hard-hat-and-safety-glasses kind of place. The steady hum of production, the gray paint on everything, the numerous catwalks and out-of-the-way staircases all suggest a manufacturing facility, not Niagara County’s repository for your dinner scraps.

Actually, they’re manufacturing electrical power in there, 28 megawatts per hour, in a “controlled combustion” process. At 3,400 degrees, there is no need to fuel the fire; it gets lit and stays lit. Garbage is sent over a downward-sloping set of rollers, into the furnace and turned into ash. Steam is captured, electricity is generated and metal is recycled. Ash gets trucked away. All of it is closely monitored.

And if you know anything about life on a shop floor, you know there are funny stories to tell. Longtime employee and tipping floor operator Ray Guilliams has a few.

“Someone might have thrown out jewelry, for example. We’ll figure out which truck it might be on and separate the truck. And we’ll look for it. One couple lost a pay packet full of money, and we found all but $20 of it. Sometimes it’s important documents. It’s a needle in as haystack, but we’ll try,” he said with that nonchalance that comes from experience.

Covanta’s Niagara Falls facility, one of 30 in the United States, is quickly building a track record of excellence. Peers recites several of the site’s distinctions: Audited certification for sound environmental management procedures, the federal Star Worksite Program for voluntary protection programs, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Performance Track program and the Niagara USA Chamber’s 2008 “Business of the Year.”

Moreover, Covanta’s process is an alternative to simply piling garbage in landfills, where our society’s detritus decomposes and produces methane, a greenhouse gas.

The energy-from-waste concept reduces the risk of toxins leaking into groundwater and saves recyclable metal, producing valuable and salable metal commodities.

According to Covanta, only 8 percent of America’s solid municipal waste gets this treatment while 64 percent still enters landfills (the rest is recycled).

Now I know where all my stuff goes when I toss it. It takes a ride in a garbage truck to Niagara Falls and gets turned into electricity.

So my garbage is powering my television. Cool world.

Ed Adamczyk is a freelance writer from Kenmore.