City’s talking trash to generate energy


The city is exploring the possibility of building “gasification” plants to convert garbage to energy so it can reduce its reliance on expensive landfills for disposing 11,000 tons a day of residential trash — but critics slammed the idea as just a new form of incineration.

“These alternatives must be part of a citywide solid waste strategy that includes robust recycling programs,” stated an update to the city’s environmental blueprint that Mayor Bloomberg released yesterday in Harlem.

David Bragdon, the mayor’s environmental adviser, insisted the new plants would be light years ahead of the incinerators proposed in past decades that raised outcries over air contamination in the communities where they were to be built.

“These are very different,” Bragdon said.

Under one technology known as anaerobic digestion, incineration wouldn’t be required at all.

Instead, microorganisms would break down food waste and other organic materials into biogas, which is combusted to generate electricity.

Another technology known as plasma gasification subjects garbage to extremely high heat to produce “syngas,” a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that is converted to fuel.

“We’re at the stage where, given the high landfill cost, we need to find new sources [of disposal],” Bragdon said. “We need to evaluate this.”

It’s costing the city hundreds of millions of dollars a year to haul away its mountains of trash, some of which ends up in landfills 600 miles away.

Bragdon pointed out that several European cities are already taking advantage of the new trash-to-energy technology.

“One of the plants is right in the heart of Copenhagen,” he said.

But there were plenty of skeptics, including City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

“I have concerns about gasification,” Quinn (D-Manhattan) told The Post. “I have a lot of questions that remain unanswered. I also have concerns. If we went that way, where would these facilities end up? . . . I’m not sure we’ll ever end up in a place where it will be OK.”

Eddie Bautista, director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, charged, “It’s a tarted-up version of incineration.”

He dismissed the experience of European cities, saying the volume of their waste is inconsequential compared to New York’s.

Bautista also said the gasification plant would require relatively clean waste, which isn’t commonly produced here because the recycling rate is so low. He expressed worries about possible toxic releases, which have occurred elsewhere.

Bragdon stressed the city won’t make a move before making its own safety assessments.

Overall, the mayor got generally high marks for other initiatives in the revised PlaNYC, which was launched in 2007.

Environmentalists were jubilant that the city imposed regulations to phase out “dirty” No. 6 and No. 4 heating oils, which are now used to heat 10,000 buildings.

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