Trash-to-Energy Plants : Garbage: A Burning Controversy

By KEVIN RODERICK

March 9, 1986 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

In his job with the City of Los Angeles, Michael Miller has taken his nose to Japan and toured the East Coast from New England to Florida. At every stop he sniffed the local garbage.

Few envy Miller. His task is to sell a skeptical public on the latest idea in garbage disposal, a concept so old it is new again--burning the foul stuff instead of burying it in the ground.

Trash burning used to be common, but it has been forbidden in the Los Angeles Basin since the infamous smog sieges of the 1950s. But, pleads Miller, a veteran of 21 years in the Bureau of Sanitation, this is not like those sooty backyard incinerators that belched ashes on the patio and soiled the hanging laundry. This is high-tech.

$170-Million Plant Planned

Near the intersection of 41st and Alameda streets, one mile east of the Memorial Coliseum, the city plans to alter the inner-city skyline with a towering $170-million plant where household refuse will be burned to make electric power. Completion of the plant is scheduled for 1989.

If it works right, Miller promises, there will be no smell, no new smog and enough power generated to serve 2,600 to 3,100 homes.

Burning trash to get energy is a way of life in Europe and Japan. And with 60 American plants burning now and new projects under way from Oregon to Oklahoma to Massachusetts, it is the rage of the 1980s in garbage circles. Mayor Tom Bradley and the City Council were early converts.

But convincing the rest of Los Angeles will not be so easy.

It is going to cost more--how much depends on the world price of oil and other vagaries--to get rid of the 5,000 tons of trash that city residents toss out in a day.

Plants have been forced to shut down in several states--New York, Connecticut, Maryland and others--after exotic methods of treating the trash before it is burned proved unreliable and, in some cases, utter failures.

Concern for Safety

Some scientists are concerned about the safety of large-scale trash burning, especially in Southern California, where the murky skies already violate federal air standards. California’s only existing plant is a small test incinerator in rural Lassen County. But the fledgling “resource recovery” industry salivates about California’s big cities, and at least 22 projects are being talked up from the San Francisco Bay Area to San Diego. Yet no trash-burning plant has proven it can meet the state’s stiff air emission rules.

The rush to build is especially fast in Los Angeles County. Sanitation officials are promoting burning as the wave of the very near future, and small plants are already being built in Long Beach and the City of Commerce. Others are planned in Irwindale, Pomona, Azusa, Puente Hills, Compton and South Gate.

“We have a lot of money in this,” said Joe Haworth, spokesman for the county sanitation districts. “We’re committed.”

Aside from smog, the scientific community is divided over the importance of findings that trash-burning plants emit dioxins, a powerful carcinogen. Dioxins are the poison compounds that tainted Agent Orange, the Vietnam-era defoliant, and are blamed for widespread animal deaths and human maladies that followed a 1976 chemical explosion in Seveso, Italy.

Sweden imposed a moratorium on new plants last year after detecting high levels of dioxins in fish and human milk near some of its 27 existing burn plants. Denmark and other European countries are reviewing their policy toward trash burning as a result of the Swedish findings. In this country, California health officials are recommending a closer examination of dioxins than most other states.

Called Safer Than Landfills

Supporters, Miller included, contend that the state-of-the-art pollution controls that these plants will carry make burning safer than the “sanitary landfill” dumps where most trash is buried today.

“With a resource-recovery facility, the waste comes in, you stabilize it, then you bury the ash and you don’t have to worry about it anymore,” Miller said. “But with landfilling there’s a maintenance problem that goes on for years and years.”

Burning is popular with local government officials across the nation who see it as a new tactic in one of the more nettlesome struggles they face in City Hall--the war against mounting garbage.

These plants burn massive heaps of trash, reducing demand for the unpopular and scarce landfills. Several canyons near here have already vanished beneath mounds of wet newspapers and lawn cuttings, leaving less than 10 years worth of space in Los Angeles County dumps and just six years of life in the last canyon the city owns.

The City of Los Angeles first got interested in burning again in 1977 when it realized that the landfills were running out and politics would probably make it impossible to acquire any more canyons for dump sites. The city used a federal grant to study the idea, and Miller, holder of a master’s degree in environmental engineering, was given the task of making sure it would work.

He inspected the successes and some of the early failures and urged the city to adopt “mass burning,” a simple approach where raw trash is burned without any special processing.

‘It Works’

“It’s the most common technology, and it works,” Miller said.

The alternative is to remove non-combustibles, such as metals and glass, then distill the leftover trash into a special fuel before burning. This innovative approach was encouraged by the EPA in the 1970s, and more than a dozen of these “refuse-derived fuel” plants are still running.

But many others using the exotic technology shut down because of repeated breakdowns, and those in Bridgeport, Conn., and Hempstead, N.Y., are going the way of Monsanto’s Baltimore plant, which was torn down and replaced by a simpler mass-burn unit.

The city’s first plant, dubbed the Los Angeles City Energy Recovery (Lancer) project, would burn 1,600 tons of household garbage a day and save, by the city’s calculation, 1.6 million miles of truck travel to the Lopez Canyon dump in the mountains above San Fernando. Every city truck that collects garbage from Hollywood to Watts would bring its loads to the plant, which would be built and operated by a private firm to be selected this spring.

Miller anticipates ground-breaking in 1987, assuming air quality and other permits are obtained as expected. Once construction begins, the City Council wants to start work quickly on a second plant somewhere on the Westside. A third plant, on the boards for the San Fernando Valley, would virtually eliminate the need to bury household rubbish collected anywhere in the city of Los Angeles.

Before the rush gains steam, however, Miller and other boosters of resource recovery face a mammoth public relations job.

The last time Los Angeles christened a new incinerator, in 1947, its dark smoke plume could be seen for miles. “The whole Lincoln Heights area is being inundated in ashes like from a volcano,” Councilman Ernest E. Debs railed at the time. “Something’s got to be done and done quick.”

A Touchy Subject

Present-day plants are cleaner. But they will be located in town near homes and schools, not isolated out of sight and smell in faraway canyons like most landfills. And garbage is a touchy subject.

Plans by a private firm to build a 3,000 ton-per-day plant in an Irwindale quarry has drawn strong opposition in a number of San Gabriel Valley cities. The furor has attracted attention in Sacramento, which until recently had been friendly territory for proponents.

Assemblyman Frank Hill (R-Whittier), whose district is near Irwindale, has introduced a bill to block the licensing of plants where the air already violates federal quality standards, as it does in much of Southern California. Assemblyman Larry Stirling (R-San Diego), unhappy about plans for a large municipal trash-burning plant in his city, has put in a bill that would block construction statewide while air-quality studies are completed.

The environmental movement is unsure how to regard the refuse-to-energy field. The Sierra Club has no position, although local chapters have endorsed a plant in Long Beach and opposed a plant in the Bay Area. The Environmental Defense Fund, a national group that researched the field, is encouraged that the plants put trash to a useful purpose. But the group feels that they discourage conservation and pose a risk that demands close monitoring.

“These are the nuclear power plants of the garbage industry,” said David Roe, an attorney and fund official in Berkeley, because of the potential threat from dioxins and toxic metals.

Miller is used to public derision. “Nobody wants somebody else’s garbage in their neighborhood,” he said. “But no matter where you put an incinerator in Los Angeles, there’s going to be somebody who’s going to see it and be near it.”

To help win acceptance, the city is requiring that the Lancer plant in South-Central Los Angeles be surrounded by landscaping and walls to cut down the noise. “With this project, the people won’t know there’s anything going on here,” Miller said, a hint of hopeful optimism lodged in his voice.

‘Community Betterment’ Grant

But, just to be sure, the city sweetened the offer with a $10-million “community betterment” grant that the area’s councilman, Gilbert Lindsay, intends to use as an all-purpose political fund to make low-interest home loans and upgrade parks in his district. “People have to live with the increased truck traffic, so they should get something for it,” Miller said.

The offering of such amenities has become a common tactic in the battle to get communities to accept other people’s garbage. Any town in Massachusetts that accepts one of these plants is paid $1 a ton by state law. Such “host fees” are becoming the norm.

In San Marcos, a community west of Escondido in San Diego County, the developer of a proposed refuse-derived fuel plant has agreed to sign a pact giving local residents unusual powers. The townspeople will have the right--without going through the usual regulatory channels--to shut the plant down if emissions exceed promised levels.

The agreement, which is being negotiated by the Environmental Defense Fund, would be the first of its kind to bypass government officials and give the power directly to the people. But opposition to the plant had been heavy in the small suburban community.

The plants themselves are little more than complex incinerators developed in Europe. But they are imposing structures.

A mass-burn plant near downtown Baltimore, opened in 1984 on the site of Monsanto’s failed refuse-derived fuel plant, provides an example of how the South-Central Los Angeles Lancer plant will work.

It is run by Signal Environmental Systems, which operates five U.S. plants and has been selected to build the mass-burn facility in San Diego. Signal and its industry rival, Ogden-Martin, are locked in an intense, and sometimes bitter, competition for the lucrative Los Angeles contract.

The Baltimore plant rises more than 10 stories. Lit by floodlights at night, its glowing hulk dominates the cross-town view from Interstate 95, the main artery connecting New York with Washington.

2,250 Tons Burned Every Day

Trash is burned around the clock--2,250 tons a day, the most any mass-burn plant consumes in the country. All handling of trash is done indoors.

Trucks line up in the yard and then enter a dumping hall the size of a small airport hangar. They deposit their loads in a concrete pit more than 100 feet high and 200 feet long. A full pit holds enough trash to bury the ball field at Dodger Stadium under six feet of leaking plastic bags, cat food cans and car batteries.

Every few minutes an overhead crane grabs a three-ton clutch of the morass and drops it down a chute to stoke the furnace. Old refrigerators and washers, automobile front ends and anything else people throw away are fed whole into the inferno.

Inside the furnace, the newly added material joins a river of flaming garbage four feet deep tumbling slowly down the length of a sloped grate. No fuel is needed other than trash. It takes nearly an hour for the garbage to be completely burned.

Computers control air flow to the fire to keep the temperature steady. Unlike oil and gas, which burn relatively cleanly and evenly, the heat value of trash varies hour by hour. “This is the worst fuel to burn. One day you’ve got watermelons, the next day you’ve got cardboard,” said Ron Broglio, vice president of operations for Signal Environmental Systems.

At the bottom of the grate, the ashes and any large metal pieces that did not burn spill into a quenching tank to cool. Then they pass by conveyor through a device called a vibrating grizzly that sorts ferrous metals from the rest.

About 60 to 100 tons of iron and steel are recovered a day and sold for scrap. The “ash,” a dark, chunky residue of half-molten glass and gritty particles, is trucked to a landfill and buried.

Steam Turns Turbines

Meanwhile, the churning fire heats water into steam in tubes on the furnace walls. The steam is steered through turbines that spin at sufficient speed to generate 60 megawatts of power, enough to serve about 4,500 Baltimore-area homes a day, which is sold to help pay for the plant.

Its duty done, the steam condenses back into water to make the trip again.

Virginia Newcomb, president of the Westport Improvement Assn., a group of nearby residents, said the plant does not smell and leaves no ashes in the largely black, low-income neighborhood. Truck traffic, and an occasional roar when the steam pressure valve blows, are the only nuisances she notices in her brick row house on Annapolis Road a quarter-mile from the plant.

Signal rebuilt the neighborhood playground, she said. “It’s a very clean operation,” she said. “What they said it would do, it’s doing.”

Newcomb conceded that she knows little about the dioxin controversy.

In 1979 the Environmental Protection Agency found dioxins coming out of the Hempstead, N.Y., plant, which set off the alarm among health officials.

Sweden’s moratorium on new plants, which is expected to be lifted later this year, heightened the debate. The EPA maintains, however, that tests it ran show the amount of airborne dioxins emitted by these trash-burning plants is minimal if the facility is built and operated correctly.

David B. Sussman, who oversaw the EPA tests as a staff engineer, left the agency last December to take a job as vice president for environmental affairs for Ogden-Martin Corp., one of the largest builders of U.S. trash-burning plants. In an interview in New York, Sussman said he viewed dioxins as “a non-problem” while he was at EPA.

But some states are skeptical.

“Dioxin in its various forms is recognized as one of the most toxic compounds,” a report from the Massachusetts Department on Environmental Quality Engineering said in January.

State Stand on Dioxins

The California Department of Health Services went further and urged state air officials to declare the dioxins a “toxic air contaminant” with no safe level in humans. The department also opened a dioxin study center at its Berkeley laboratory. The state Air Resources Board will decide whether to regulate dioxin emissions statewide in May.

Barry Commoner, one of the deans of the environmental movement, has traveled the country to contend that the dioxins carried in exhaust from the average refuse-to-energy plant pose a real threat to surrounding residents

“We cannot at this point show that there is an operable method of controlling dioxins,” said Commoner, a Ph.D. who has researched trash burning at the Center for Biology and Natural Studies at Queens College in New York.

Dioxins are not intentionally manufactured anywhere. They are created when chlorine atoms attach to certain molecules sometime during combustion. There is evidence that dioxins have become a problem only since chlorinated plastics, such as plastic garbage bags, came into wide use after World War II.

“The entry of chlorinated plastic into the waste stream has converted the incinerator into a dioxin factory,” said Commoner, who has argued to block new incinerators in Brooklyn, Minneapolis and Rutland, Vt.

But the issue is far from clear. State and local officials scrambling to set safe standards for dioxins have been hindered by the lack of scientific consensus and basic research.

For instance, until recently most experts agreed that dioxins form inside the furnace from incomplete burning. Thus, the dioxins could probably be destroyed by burning at 1,800 degrees or hotter. But a Canadian study last year suggested that dioxins form again as the exhaust cools on its way up the smokestack.

Despite the new evidence, many states remain sure that hotter fires will limit dioxins.

‘Control the Toxic Emissions’

“Our belief is that high temperature in the front end, where the combustion actually occurs, is what will control the toxic emissions,” said Sanford Weiss, director of engineering for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which would regulate plants in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

The trouble, scientists say, is that few laboratories can detect the trace levels of dioxin that emanate from trash furnaces. Even fewer can decipher the exact compound. Researchers have identified 75 different dioxin compounds, or polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs), but there have been human risk studies conducted on less than a handful.

In urging regulation, the California Department of Health Services said acute overexposure can cause skin disorders and nausea, while studies of exposure over time have found elevated cholesterol and abnormal neurological activity. Mice and rats have developed cancer tumors and birth defects in laboratory studies. The animal data is used to estimate the human danger.

California’s controversial position that dioxins have no safe human threshold is not shared by the EPA or most other agencies that have looked at the evidence. But the state’s toxicologists argue that theirs was the prudent approach given the limited knowledge about the potency of dioxins. “No two groups look at it the same way,” said Dr. Alex Kelter of the Department of Health Services.

Dioxin emissions vary widely from plant to plant and state to state. But industry spokesmen argue that advances in the technology have reduced emissions to negligible levels in newer facilities. And the latest study, conducted on a new Signal Environmental Systems plant in Peekskill, N.Y., found the lowest dioxin emissions yet.

“We proved that better results are achievable,” said Signal President Alfred E. Del Bello, a former New York lieutenant governor.

Dioxin Measurements Required

Because of the dioxin furor, Massachusetts is requiring that all plants measure their dioxin emissions to see if there is a problem. But officials say they have no plans to restrict operations.

“Dioxin appears to be an air toxic we should worry about, but it also appears to be a toxic we can handle,” said Bruce Maillet, director of the air quality division for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Quality Engineering.

California air and health officials are also encouraging local authorities to require dioxin monitoring in plant permits. But they have made no call to restrict the issuance of permits.

However, since the dioxin issue arose, the state Air Resources Board has recommended that all plant developers be required to prepare a sophisticated analysis of toxic emissions called a health-risk assessment. The Long Beach and Commerce projects received their construction permits without such an examination of possible risks, but Air Resources Board officials--who advise local pollution regulators--said they believe that most local authorities will now require the studies before issuing any new permits.

A few large plants--those that generate more than 50 megawatts of power a day, such as the proposed Irwindale and San Diego city plants--will be licensed by the state Energy Commission. But most facilities will be licensed by local air pollution control districts. By and large, the local regulatory boards that will actually make the rules have indicated that they will abide by the state experts’ recommendations that the plants be thoroughly monitored and carry the latest in pollution controls.

Los Angeles city officials worry more about an EPA rule that forbids new industrial plants from adding any new oxides of nitrogen, a key element of smog, to the atmosphere.

Before the Lancer plant can be licensed, the city must either reduce the oxides of nitrogen pumped from its other facilities or buy pollution “credits” from private companies. In fact, the city must actually improve air quality in the basin by removing more oxides than the Lancer plant will emit.

Problem in Meeting Standard

City officials had believed they could meet the requirement by putting new pollution devices on other city power plants and engines. But it now appears those steps will not remove enough oxides of nitrogen to qualify for the permit. Miller and other city officials think the city can probably purchase enough credits for the first Lancer project, but they have no idea about the second and third proposed plants. “That’s going to be the big job around here for the next year,” Miller said.

Even without the added cost of pollution credits, the projects are more expensive than simply burying trash.

Originally, Chief Administrative Officer Keith Comrie said the added cost could be met by other city revenues. But that depends on a healthy economy and continued federal aid to the city, and there is now internal discussion of passing some of the cost to taxpayers in the form of a trash collection fee.

The city will own the Lancer site; it is currently in condemnation proceedings to acquire the land. The city will pay either Ogden-Martin or Signal Environmental Systems to build the actual plant and pay the selected firm more than $11 million annually to run it for 20 years.

The city’s staff was prepared to recommend Ogden to the City Council, but negotiations were reopened until March 14 after Signal complained that Ogden gained an unfair advantage.

The final cost will be determined by the amount of electricity generated and the price that the Department of Water and Power pays to buy it over the years. By federal law, public utilities are required to buy the energy generated by resource recovery plants at the market price, which will fluctuate with the world price of oil.

TRASH-TO-ENERGY INCINERATORS

With landfill space dwindling, Southern California communities are turning to huge trash incinerators that generate electricity for sale to utilities. While the plants differ in design, these are the typical steps in a “mass burn” plant, the most common in the U.S. The plants usually operate 24 hours a day, all year.

1. Garbage is dumped into the pit, typically without any processing. The pit can hold 8,000 tons of trash, enough to cover the Dodger Stadium field 6 feet deep. Air from this pit is pulled into the furnace so odors do not escape.

2. Each crane load drops 2 to 3 tons of trash, including whole refrigerators and other home applicances, into the furnace hopper. A hydraulic ram pushes the trash into the furnace, which burns at 1800 degrees Farenheit.

3. Burning trash is piled 3 to 4 feet deep on the furnace grate. No outside fuel is added. The special grates tumble and mix the trash for thorough burning. Air is blown through the gratefrom below to aid the burning, which many scientists believe helps reduce the emission of pollutants and toxic elements such as dioxin into the atmosphere.

4. Pipes in the upper furnace walls carry water, which is turned into steam by the heat of furnace. The steam is superheated before spinning the turbines to produce electricity.

5. Burned garbage falls into a quenching tank to cool. The ash and gritty residue is taken by conveyor belt and sifted to remove metals, which can be sold as scrap. Most of the residue is buried, taking up only 5% as much landfill space as the original garbage. In some states, the

residue has been used in road-building or as a landfill cover.

The Gases: Exhaust from the furnace flows through a series of pollution control devices before going out a 300-foot stack. Most local plants will be required to meet more stringent emission levels than required elsewhere, although some officials are concerned about trace amounts of toxic emissions such as dioxin. From outside, there is little or no visible smoke or discernible odor.

The Ash: Small amounts of ash collected in the furnace and the pollution controls are mixed with the bulky residue taken from the furnace and trucked away for burial in landfills.

AT 300 FEET THE STACK IS AS TALL AS TWO STATUES OF LIBERTY

CALIFORNIA INCINERATOR SITES

There are now 60 working waste-to-energy incinerators in the United States. Just one is located in California, but another 21 here are under construction, awaiting permits or in planning.

Proposed plants are listed with the planned capacity in tons of garbage burned per day.

*1-Susanville 100

2 - Ukiah 100

3 - Richmond 900

4 - Redwood City (for San Francisco) 3,000

5 - Fremont 475

6 - Modesto 800

7 - Sanger 400

8 - Visalia 350

9 - Oxnard 300

10 - Azusa 2,000

11 - Irwindale 3,000