A waste-to-energy (WTE) plant is a facility that burns municipal solid waste (MSW) in boilers to produce steam and then electricity. Sixty WTE plants were operating in the United States in 2022, with a total generating capacity of 2,051 megawatts (MW) that supplied less than one percent of the country’s electricity.1
Throughout the country’s history, the cheapest and easiest way to deal with garbage was to bury it. These became known as landfills, and all landfills eventually reached capacity. From 1979 to 1991, the United States exhausted more than two-thirds of its landfills. Between 1983 and 1987, for example, New York closed 200 of its 500 landfills.2 Space for new landfills grew increasingly scarce in the densely populated urban areas of the East Coast. From Massachusetts to Maryland, municipalities turned to WTE plants to deal with their garbage problems. A modest building boom ensued from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. By the early 1990s, the United States combusted more than 15 percent of all MSW.3
WTE facilities are frequently classified as renewable sources of electricity because the fuel supply (garbage) is continuous and reliable, and because some of the fuel is biogenic (paper, yard trimmings, food waste, textiles, and some containers and packaging). But the waste stream also includes non-biogenic materials such as plastics, metals, and glass, suggesting that the “renewable” moniker is misleading. Like their fossil fuel counterparts, WTE plants create significant air, water, and solid wastes that require expensive pollution control equipment.
Very few WTE facilities have been built in the United States since the mid-1990s due to community opposition, high cost compared to other sources of electricity, and the increased emphasis in many communities on waste reduction, recycling, and composting.
1 U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Waste-to-energy plants are a small but stable source of electricity in the United States,” March 21, 2023, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55900
2 Lodge, George C. and Jeffrey F. Rayport, “Knee-deep and Rising: America’s Recycling Crisis,” Harvard Business Review Magazine, September-October 1991, https://hbr.org/1991/09/knee-deep-and-rising-americas-recycling-crisis
3 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Energy Recovery from the Combustion of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW),” accessed December 19, 2023, Link
