Dumpster Diving

Yet another solid waste story. Sorry.
by Marc B. Haefele

Twenty-six years ago, a gray-eyed, thin, young man in a beautiful green suit traveled through the evenings of my East Coast suburban town. He had a mission, and he had a skinny, little pocket calculator. His mission was to sell officials on the idea of trash-to-energy incinerators.

The little, silver calculator was a prop. The man, let’s call him Jim, would go before a nighttime council meeting—part-timers these guys were, nodding a bit following their after-work Michelobs—and propose that the city give him the variances to put up a huge electricity-generating trash burner. There was a lot in it for them, Jim would say, those fanatic eyes of his searching out the members’ greedy souls. Millions in tipping fees, plus free power for the whole town. The leftover ash was useful for something too, though I forget exactly what. He sang his song to local politicians and they listened.

Then some reporter would ask, “but what about all those bad smokestack chemicals raining down?” That’s when Jim would pull out his calculator and hold it up. “Just as technology has, in five years, taken us from the noisy old desk calculator to this,” he’d say, “so with trash burners.” He said his proposed new burner would produce about as much pollution as his little 5-function gizmo. Some towns bit the bait. To this day, a pestilent gray snow drifts over them, year around. Turns out, whoops, these things really did pollute—and how. But Jim’s company had its 20-year contracts and that was it. Not too many Jimburners got built. But those that did, you can still smell them miles away.

In the early ’80s, even L.A. had its own “Jim” burner proposal. It was called LANCER, and it became the most famous waste burner never built. Its 14-acre site is now the embattled South Central Farm at Avalon and 41st. By the mid-’80s, though, no one wanted a waste burner next door—not even the poor people of South L.A., who hit the streets and overthrew the city proposal in a pioneering stroke of inner-city environmental awareness.

So, generally speaking, large-scale waste-to-energy burners became a thing of the past without ever having been a thing of the present. Recycling got hyped instead at the particular urging of former City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter. Los Angeles now recycles about 62 percent of its household waste material. This means that despite all the city’s growth since, no more solid waste goes into our landfills than it did in 1990—although it hovers at 3,600 tons a day (about the weight of a middling WW II warship). Sure, we could recycle more—but from here on it gets a lot harder. Apartment recycling is moving ahead, after successful pilot programs, but at this point, only about 11 percent of larger multiple unit buildings have it. And right now, most Angelenos live in multiple units, minus recycling.

Yes, this is another trash-waste recycling story—aren’t we all burnt out on them? Sci-Fi genius Philip K. Dick said that he was tired of garbage-future stories 40 years ago. But garbage goes on being our future anyway because too many of us toss out so much stuff. Last week I wrote about the council’s agreement to schlep 6,000 of those daily 3,600 tons of L.A.’s Sunshine Canyon refuse out of the county. Not such a hot idea, environmentally speaking. But what about all the rest of it? Where will it go, particularly the stuff that won’t recycle?

It will eventually go to waste-to-energy plants, according to Greig Smith, the 12th District Council Member who has the Sunshine Canyon dump on his doorstep. I asked him because he’s the guy who came up with Renew L.A., the 400-page standing blueprint for L.A.’s waste disposal future. As I skimmed its six-page summary, I was appalled at the possibility that L.A. might have not one, but six new LANCERs belching into the environment. Is that really the only alternative to landfills? As Smith sees it, there’s no choice: “In five years we’re out of Sunshine Canyon; waste-to-energy is the most efficient way of doing the thing.” At this point my entire life’s experience flew past me. Not that mistake again, I told myself. The lies I heard in the late 1970s about solid waste burners were still a touchstone of distrust in my journalistic career.

But old Jim’s pocket calculator is now a Blackberry. Tech has moved along. It turns out that L.A. County already has two sizable energy burners taking in hundreds of truckloads of daily waste without polluting—according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District. One is in Long Beach, one in City of Commerce. The Commerce operation burns 360 tons a day—the equivalent of 10 percent of L.A.’s trash, less than one percent of the whole county’s. (Long Beach burns a lot more). What has been added to the basic burner to make it clean is a huge array of active and passive emission controls as large as the energy plant itself. With these, apparently, this delinquent technology can be made to fly right. “It’s as much art as science,” says affable County Sanitation District spokesman Joe Howard. “It’s about getting the mix of refuse components right,” as well as knowing when to toss the right additives into the exhaust when things start getting toxic. And yes, those two burners together produce enough electricity to power, so it is claimed, around 90,000 homes. Sounds pretty good, but it would take about 10 Commerce-sized waste plants to handle the city of L.A.’s trash. Smith’s plan wants just six plants. How would that work? Particularly since four of the sites, according to Smith, are close to residential areas, where, as one city official put it, “Incineration tends to ignite passions.” Remember LANCER?

Smith obviously does remember. He talks of a new generation of waste-energy “transformation,” not new tech, just tech we haven’t seen here in this spacious, landfill-rich nation. Commerce and Long Beach’s plants work fine, but Smith wants to see the city go to a new generation of waste-energy generation, “without smoke stacks,” the kind of plant in general use in Japan and Germany. He’s asked for an outside firm to evaluate new technologies—gasification, pyrolisis, air-free high temp reduction, any combination of which could be used on the L.A. Renew sites. In Smith’s opinion, L.A. dropped the ball with LANCER, and now we have to catch up with the cities that had to stop dumping trash years ago. “We made promises,” he says. Now “we have to keep them.”

Meanwhile, it will be well for journalists to remember the waste burner fiascos of 25 years ago. As county spokesman Howard put it, the media has a job in this too. “It’s to be very skeptical.” LAA