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 Sometime this year, the city of Copenhagen will open a small 1,400 ft. ski slope with three ski trails along its waterfront. Skiers and snowboarders will get to the top via elevators and surface lifts. In the summer, the slope will turn into a public park with one façade used as a rock wall for climbing.
And while Amager Bakke will provide easily accessible outdoor recreation for thousands of urban Danes, it is but a secondary feature of the construction. The facility’s main purpose is actually to burn up to 1,100 tons of rubbish each day to provide up to 247 MW of heat or 63 MW of electricity for the community.
That’s because Amager Bakke is actually a waste-to-energy (WtE) plant that was built with a social conscience. Not only will leisure activities remind residents of the power of recycling, but so too will the plant’s chimney, which will emit exhaust as a smoke ring with every ton of carbon dioxide burned (roughly equal to one ton of solid waste burned).
WtE facilities are not a new concept, but arguably an underappreciated one. It helps solve two important community issues: landfill reduction and energy creation. WtE facilities are most common in Europe, where denser populations result in shrinking space that can be dedicated to landfills. The creation of energy from a WtE typically drives down local energy prices as well.
 In 2016, less than 1% of Sweden’s garbage ended up in a landfill. In the U.S. in 2014, more than 52% of our garbage had been landfilled. Exactly one WtE plant has been built since then (the first since 1995), so it’s safe to estimate our landfill percentage hasn’t changed dramatically since.
WtE plants have been on the back burner in the U.S. for several reasons. For decades, it has been cheaper to bury and forget about waste, rather than build a ten- or hundred-million-dollar facility. Additionally, WtE plants only really make sense if they’re built at least somewhat close to a population center, but no one really wants a trash fire near their house after all.
Environmentalists sometimes argue that WtEs discourage recycling (despite evidence to the contrary) and that only ‘zero-waste’ strategies should be pursued. These individuals might also point out that WtEs create pollution, including fly ash and incinerator bottom ash, which often contain concentrations of heavy metals that must be disposed of carefully. Particulate matter still ends up in the atmosphere to some degree. However, government carefully legislates how to deal with these pollutants. And the most carcinogenic of these pollutants, dioxin and furan, are kept in check by advanced filtering technologies such as lime scrubbers, electro-static precipitators, baghouse filters, reactors, and catalysts. In 1990, WtE plants contributed one-third of dioxin emissions in Germany, but 10 years later it was less than 1%.
When comparing WtE to landfilling with gas recapture in terms of greenhouse gases, there really isn’t much of a comparison. Incineration of one ton of municipal solid waste will generate about one ton of carbon dioxide. Had that ton of solid waste ended up in a landfill, it would have likely generated at least 1.38 tons of carbon dioxide. Incineration also prevents the release of methane in most instances. Since the fuel sources of WtE plants are at least partially biomass-based, it offsets the carbon for each plant product burned if another plant was sown in its place.
In the U.S., Florida and four states in New England are the WtE pacesetters, but there seems to be little appetite for more WtE plants, even in urban locales like New York and Los Angeles that ship their garbage hundreds of miles away, adding to the carbon footprint and cost of waste disposal.
There are other technologies that could make WtE more palatable for Americans. Gasification heats waste to very high temperatures without burning it and the resulting vapors are mixed with oxygen to create syngas. Plasma gasification is closely related and is used on Ford class aircraft carriers. Mechanical biological treatment plants don’t use thermal processes at all. Rather, they break down organic waste with anaerobic or aerobic microorganisms and, in most instances, can recapture biogas. This typically reduces waste volume destined for the landfill by half and eliminates carbon dioxide and methane emissions from landfilled rubbish.
No one is necessarily here to compare the progressive policies of Europe against those of the U.S., but what’s clear is that there is a lot of opportunity for WtE plants in America as the technology is here, and so too is the emphasis on sustainability. What we’re lacking is the willpower.
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