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Expanded plant converts 1,800 tons of garbage to power daily

Staff photo by JIM REED

The ashes created from burning garbage are loaded onto trucks and sent to the county landfill at Hillsborough County's waste-to-energy plant. Metals are recovered and recycled. Burning garbage to produce electricity reduces the volume of the waste by 90 percent and reduces its weight by 75 percent.

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By YVETTE C. HAMMETT | The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 15, 2009

BRANDON - Nearly every day, burly dump trucks filled to the brim with leftover pizza, soiled diapers and discarded egg cartons roll into an expansive metal warehouse and eject their contents onto the concrete floor.

Enormous iron claws – the steroid version of the grab-it machine gizmos –shoot down from above, corralling the refuse, then dumping it on to a platform, the first steps in its conversion to kilowatts.

"Hillsborough County had a heads-up on renewable energy before most," said Joe Treshler, vice president of business development for Covanta, the company that runs the county's waste-to-energy plant.

The county first built the plant in 1986. Between then and now, waste-to-energy hit some significant snags, including protests from environmental groups over mercury and other pollutants spewing from the stacks.

Today, with numerous retrofitted pollution control devices in place, an increasing need to conserve landfill space and the rising cost of fuel, Hillsborough County moved forward with plans to enlarge its plant.

"We hit capacity and started having to divert household garbage to the landfill, so the county made the decision to go ahead and expand," said Tom Smith, environmental manager for the solid waste department.

"And when we had hearings on the expansion," Treshler said, "there was nobody objecting."

Covanta completed a $130 million addition to the plant on Falkenburg Road in September, enabling it to convert 1,800 tons of garbage a day into electricity. That is a 50 percent increase over its previous capacity.

The expansion gives the plant at least another 20 years of life, Smith said.

From the outside, the only real evidence that the county is burning garbage is in the steam coming from the stack. The entire operation is contained, to eliminate the escape of odor and pollution during the process.

The operation generated $18.2 million in revenue this year by creating 45 megawatts of electricity per day. That's enough electricity to power 40,000 houses a day, Smith said. The electricity is sold to Tampa Electric Co., which in turn, sells it to customers.

Treshler said there is no direct benefit to the consumer as far as cutting down the home electric bill, but the plant provides a definite benefit to the county as a whole, because some 3.6 million pounds of refuse every single day is diverted from the county landfill.

That extends the life of the 196-acre permitted county landfill by some 35 years, Smith said.

Reporter Yvette C. Hammett can be reached at (813) 627-4763.

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