When it comes to garbage, geography is destiny. Look at聽Texas and Florida,聽recovering聽from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. 国产麻豆owners and businesses not incapacitated by the storm have begun the arduous and emotional work of separating destroyed possessions and materials by type聽and placing them curbside. Cities have begun the intimidating logistics of picking it up and transporting it to its final destination.
And what is that destination? Texas鈥檚 waste-disposal strategy takes advantage of the state鈥檚 vast land. Harris County alone, which includes Houston, has 14 active聽landfills.
Florida, by contrast, is a peninsula with a longer coastline than any state other than Alaska, and much less room for trash. Many coastal Florida counties burn theirs, with waste incinerators聽particularly common around the state鈥檚 populous southern lip聽and up the Gulf Coast. It鈥檚 a two-fer. Combustion reduces the solid waste聽to ash, and the heat that鈥檚 produced runs steam generators. Much of the waste left in Irma鈥檚 path will burn, the energy released adding to local communities鈥� electricity.
Florida burns a聽disproportionate amount of U.S. trash. Ten聽鈥渨aste-to-energy鈥� plants turned 4.5 million tons of trash into 3.5 million megawatt-hours statewide in 2016. That鈥檚 about 2 percent of the state鈥檚聽overall power, and a large majority of its renewable energy.聽Burning trash makes up less than 0.5聽percent of overall U.S. electricity production, according to the Energy Information Administration.
But the main point is to make stuff disappear.聽Incineration reduces the solid mass of trash by up to 90 percent. The leftover ash can then be more efficiently dumped in a landfill聽where space is precious. In 2016, Florida burned 12 percent of its trash, recycled 44 percent, and another 44 percent went into landfills. With all that, Florida聽has historically been an聽exporter of garbage to other states, the 10th聽largest in a 2007聽study by the Congressional Research Service.
Waste-fueled power plants were built mostly in the 1980s聽and early 1990s, encouraged by a 1978 federal聽law. Environmental scrutiny in later years led to widespread retrofits of 聽pollution-control technologies聽to remove mercury and dioxin.
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