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Iino: The Future Is Us

There’s a video going around the Internet extolling Sweden for using its trash as fuel and urging the United States to follow Sweden’s lead. Well, we have seen the future, and it is us. Virtually all of Connecticut’s garbage already goes to trash-to-energy plants already; all landfills in Connecticut have been closed. Connecticut is the leading state, not just in the nation but in the Western Hemisphere, for sustainable handling of waste.

Killingworth’s non-recyclable trash goes to a trash-to-energy plant in Hartford. That plant is run by Connecticut’s Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority (MIRA), which the state created “to develop and implement environmentally sound solutions and best practices for solid waste disposal and recycling management.”

Burning our garbage means that we don’t need to truck it or ship it out of state, with all the environmental and financial costs of transportation. And MIRA sells the energy it generates, reducing the cost of waste disposal. (Ironically, lower electricity generation prices recently have reduced MIRA’s income from energy sales and thus increased tipping fees.)

MIRA also collects and sells plastic, glass, metal, paper, and cardboard recyclables. For the last decade, we have had single-stream recycling, which means residents don’t have to sort their recyclables themselves, which increases recycling levels substantially. Killingworth continues to sort to some degree at our transfer station, because that reduces our hauling costs.

By the way, your waste goes to MIRA whether you bring it to Killingworth’s transfer station or you have it picked up by a hauler.

Other programs help reduce the amount of garbage we pay to get rid of. At our transfer station, we collect electronics for recycling, for example, and returnable bottles and cans, which benefit our local boy scouts and girl scouts. “Stewardship” programs, in which manufacturers take responsibility for disposal of their products at the end of the products’ life—the Paintcare program is an example—also help.

Overall, the more we recycle, the lower our waste disposal costs. Killingworth’s level of recycling—the percentage of “waste” that gets recycled—has been stagnant in recent years, and it should be going up.

To return to trash-to-energy: The current plant has been in operation for several decades and is sorely in need of renovation. Last year, the state selected a firm called Sacyr-Rooney to redevelop the plant and upgrade MIRA’s resource recovery efforts overall with such innovations as improved sorting of recyclables and anaerobic digestion of organic trash to generate gas for fuel and usable compost. Many questions about the Sacyr-Rooney proposal remain to be answered, however, ranging from the feasibility of components of the plan to the impact on local waste disposal costs. Garbage disposal isn’t a glamorous topic, but it has big implications for the more prominent issues of environment and taxes.

At a time when Connecticut is struggling in so many ways, we should be proud of our leadership in sustainable waste management, and we should make sure we don’t trash it. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.)