By Susan Jarvis
November 9, 2009

Florida is home to eleven waste to energy plants, housed in nine separate counties, combusting 19,000 tons per day – 6.5 million tons of waste per year, making it America’s leader in renewable energy from waste. Since 2000, three facilities have been expanded, and new technological capacities added, creating new benchmarks for So2, HCL, NOx, ammonia, and mercury.

The new Palm Beach County Facility, a mass burn facility, will have the capacity to combust 3,000 tons per day while utilizing state-of-the-art pollution controls. Tom Henderson, Associate, Malcolm Pirnie and MWMA Past President, touted some of the design features of the new facility, including a visitors center, which features a skywalk with views, articulated walls of clear, translucent, and colored panels, living walls with green vines, and the ability to harvest the rainwater. Additionally, the design concept plans to “hide” the stacks. Designed in an oblong shape, the stacks are oriented so the thin wedge is pointed to the community. With the creation of this new facility, as well as the expansion of others, “Waste to Energy is alive and well in Florida,” said Henderson.

Joe Murdoch, Vice President of HDR, Inc., gave attendees an overview of current waste to energy technologies, and discussed how waste to energy can play an important role in reaching municipalities diversion level goals and update on Los Angeles’s waste to energy project.

After adopting a series of aggressive green initiatives including 90 percent diversion by 2025, Los Angeles began to explore waste to energy options. In September 2005, 240 technologies were screened and an RFP were released in February 2007 for a full'scale commercial facility and an emerging technology facility. The city is currently evaluating the six commercial and two alternative energy proposals, and identifying and narrowing down the list of potential sites, with design and construction to begin in 2012.