Trucking your community waste long distances can now be reduced or eliminated. DTE’s Green Waste to Fuel™ to Energy facility enables shorter trucking distances within the community. This results in less air pollution and less truck traffic. As landfills disappear or are regulated out of existence, we find that most large regional landfills are often located far from the communities using them.

We project these transportation fees will continue to increase substantially beyond the estimates most municipalities use in their long term planning cycles. Kentucky may have capacity for approximately 200+ million tons of waste. At a projected rate of $30 per ton, that’s $6 billion in revenue mostly coming from other states and municipalities outside of Kentucky. Ohio might have as much as $21 billion of available landfill capacity.

Tipping fees remain in your town where the waste was generated. Large regional landfills are most often privately owned. The revenue they produce does not remain in the community that generated the waste. Tipping fees at regional landfills are based on levels of competition from other regional landfills and may not be related to the cost of disposal. Because of long-term contracts and a fixed debt repayment structure, Green Waste to Energy™ to Fuel plants offer stable and predictable tipping fees for municipal waste. Large regional landfills, usually privately owned, compete with other landfills for waste and the resulting tipping fees can be unpredictable.

Tipping Fees and Transportation Costs May Escalate Due to Shrinking Limited Landfill Capacity

The problem with landfill space is much more political than geographical in nature. Legislation in most communities is moving against the development of new landfills, public or private. Emerging problems with landfill stability, pollution and related health impact make it highly undesirable for any community to consider a new landfill. On top of this, existing landfills are filling up and losing capacity.

Not all states have the same problem. The variation between states is quite large. Arkansas apparently has enough capacity to go more than 500+ years without opening another facility. New York state, despite shipping most of the Big Apple’s trash across state lines, has only about 25+ years of capacity left. As of January 2015, there were approximately 27 active muncipal solid waste landfills within New York State. By year end in 2010, the landfills had 200+ million tons of capacity remaining. This gives the Big Apple approximately 28.5 years of capacity using a projected number of 7.7 million tons per year. In any case most of New York City’s waste is hauled or railed to other states far away.

The economy of the community is enhanced. The average waste to energy facility in the US is responsible for the creation of 58 full time jobs (note 1). Generally, these are salaried, skilled positions with relatively high pay. And, these jobs have at least a 40 year projected life. Of course, Delta Thermo Energy builds and manages Green Waste to Fuel™ to Energy plants, but the numbers are relatively close depending on plant capacity.

Note 1: Per the Energy Recovery Council.