Waste-to-Energy and Environmental Regulations
The waste-to-energy industry is one of the most stringently regulated industries in the United States. Wheelabrator's waste-to-energy plants use the most advanced emissions control and monitoring technology yet developed to meet federal, state, and local requirements.
Environmental Management Systems (EMS)
Wheelabrator's EMS stricly manages compliance with all applicable environmental laws and regulations. Wheelabrator's EMS is consistent with criteria for ISO-14001 certification and ensures environmental excellence throughout its operations. The EMS identifies enterprise-wide compliance tasks, audits the actions of internal and external personnel, and regularly reports detailed system metrics to company senior management. As a result, the system has helped drive year-over-year compliance improvements at Wheelabrator facilities using the following practices and procedures:
- Wheelabrator's Environmental Handbook - details all employee stewardship responsibilities and basic environmental practices;
- WM Environmental Policy (Wheelabrator Technologies and Waste Management) - committed to environmental protection, compliance with all requirements and conservation of resources;
- CyberRegs - a dynamic database of all current relevant regulation changes and amendments;
- Mandatory Training - programs for environmental protection and compliance awareness;
- CYCLE (Compliance, Your Complete Link to Excellence) - its proprietary web-based EMS compliance system; and
- Environmental Audit Systems - use internal personnel and outside experts to consistently check compliance status. An Environmental Scorecard is used by senior-level management to review compliance objectives, targets, and metrics for each of Wheelabrator Technologies' plants on a weekly basis.
Ash Testing
Waste-to-energy facilities use combustion to convert trash into clean, renewable electricity. The combustion process produces an ash residue disposed of in a conventional landfill.
In accordance with federal law, waste-to-energy ash is tested to ensure it is non-hazardous. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) developed an aggressive test called the Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure to determine if metals will leach from the material. If metals leach in amounts greater than a fraction of a percent, the ash is considered hazardous. Years of testing ash from every waste-to-energy facility in the country have proven that ash is safe for disposal and even reuse. Waste-to-energy ash consistently passes the EPA test, despite the fact that the test greatly exaggerates the potential for metals to leach from ash.
While landfill wastewater is regulated as an industrial discharge, test results and measurements taken from operating ash landfills show the levels of metals present in the actual ash leachate are most often below the significantly more restrictive drinking water standards and far lower than the EPA toxicity criteria.
When trash is combusted in a waste-to-energy facility, the resulting ash represents about 10 percent of the volume of the original trash. Metals, such as iron, steel, copper and zinc are recovered from the ash at the facility and sent to be recycled into new metal products, leaving a residue that looks a lot like wet cement. This residue actually has physical properties similar to construction mixtures such as concrete. After a short time, the ash "cures" and resembles concrete.
But disposal is not the only option. Nearly three million tons of ash, or more than one-third of all residues, are being reused annually as landfill roadbed materials, daily and final landfill cover, road aggregate, asphalt-mixture, and even cement blocks.
