Transforming Trash in Nashville

...The facility, operated by a nonprofit corporation, will heat and cool more than thirty city, state, and nongovernmental buildings in the downtown area under John Egerton is a free lance writer based in Nashville...

...Reduce the amount of electricity needed in a typical building by as much as fifty per cent...

...When it is in full operation next June, the plant will: • Replace the individual heating and cooling systems of its customers, at a savings of some twenty million kilowatt hours of electricity the first year...

...There is no new technology involved in the Nashville facility...

...Carl Avers, the thirty-five-year-old general manager and chief engineer of the Nashville Thermal Transfer Corporation, says the plant will produce even more economies as it grows: "On the strength of the contracts we signed with our customers, we raised $16.5 million from revenue bonds to finance construction...

...When you can conserve energy, save money, get rid of trash, and reduce pollution all at once, that's a real accomplishment...

...The Nashville plant simply combines those proven ideas, and the happy result is beginning to look like one of those rare bonanzas that helps everybody...

...He is the author of "A Mind to Stay Here," a book of profiles about the South...

...Save the city government more than $1.25 million a year through reductions in the cost of garbage collection and sanitary land-fill operations...

...Garbage and trash collection trucks that used to dump their cargo in sanitary land-fills will deliver it instead to strategically located transfer stations, where fully enclosed semi-trailer trucks will pick it up and take it to a refuse pit at the plant site...

...Avers points out that the new plant is replacing more than thirty heating and cooling systems that had no environmental controls with a single system that more than meets the requirements of the Environmental Protection Agency...

...Our rate scale is based on the amount of money needed to retire the bonds and operate the plant...

...cities (Chicago, Miami, Norfolk, and Harris-burg) do that, almost twenty produce some centralized heating and cooling by using conventional fossil fuels...

...Bring about a substantial reduction in air pollution...

...Trash, then, is a four-billion-dollar-a-year liability, not to mention a visual blight and a health hazard...

...That being so, it is mind-boggling to discover that one American city is about to reduce heating and cooling costs, cut fossil fuel consumption, lessen air pollution, and lower the cost of collecting and disposing of solid waste—and do all of that by converting its refuse from an energy-consuming eyesore to an energy-producing fuel...

...thirty-year, non-cancelable contracts...

...The city, which has about 1,400 tons of trash a day to dispose of, has agreed to give the new corporation as much of it as it wants, free of charge, for the next thirty years...

...Virtually eliminate the city's solid waste disposal problem by reducing its volume by ninety-five per cent and leaving a five per cent residue of metal that can be recycled and ash that can be resold for a variety of uses...

...And the more customers we add, the greater the savings...

...Reduce the heating and cooling costs of the customers by at least twenty-five per cent...

...There, a crane will pick up the waste matter in one-ton bites and feed it into the incinerator-boilers...

...With this one system, we are attacking the energy problem, the waste-disposal problem, the pollution problem, and the inflation problem...

...Require less water than the heating and cooling plants it replaces...

...As a nonprofit corporation, it is exempt from supervision by the Tennessee Public Utilities Commission...

...The plant will consume virtually every kind of solid waste...

...A network of underground pipes will distribute steam and chilled water to and from the plant and the buildings it serves...

...Presumably, the idea could be applied not just to downtown buildings but to large institutions, shopping centers, industrial parks, and even concentrated housing projects...

...To think of trash and garbage as a valuable resource instead of a stinking nuisance will require some getting used to...

...No fewer than 150 European cities create steam from the burning of solid waste, and while only four U.S...

...The thermal transfer plant is located on the site of an old railway terminal beside the Cumberland River in downtown Nashville...

...Its board of directors is made up of its major customers—state and local government officials...

...only large, bulky items—old refrigerators and the like—will be culled...

...The process of incineration is such that potential odor problems will be eliminated, and the emission of nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxides, and smoke will be at least seventy-five per cent less than the pre-existing heating and cooling systems created...

...The Nashville plant eventually will be enlarged to consume all of the city's disposal solid waste, and since it can also be operated on conventional fossil fuels, it could be made even larger...

...Initially, the plant will consume about half of the available solid waste to produce almost 400,000 pounds of steam per hour and about 14,000 tons of air conditioning...

...Eventually, it will use all of the city's available refuse, and its heating and cooling capacity will be increased accordingly...

...Nashville, Tennessee, is not the first city to burn solid waste, nor the first to operate a centralized heating and cooling plant, nor even the first to recover heat from trash incineration...

...Other cities have sent representatives to Nashville to investigate the facility, and many of them are likely to build their own thermal transfer plants in the future...

...The day may even come when you will be able to sell the stuff instead of paying somebody to haul it away, and therein may lie the only potential disadvantage to using it as fuel: If Americans produce 200 million tons of waste now, how much more would we be inspired to create if we could sell it at a profit...

...But in April, when the contents of local trash cans are used for the first time to stoke the boilers of the city's new thermal transfer plant, Nashville will have the world's first large-scale plant producing both steam and chilled water from solid waste...

...The corporation developing the plant is a private legal entity with no government subsidy...

...By the most conservative estimates, it costs more than $20 a ton to collect it and dispose of it in an incinerator or a sanitary land-fill—the latter being a euphemism for the malodorous junk graveyards that gobble up about 60,000 acres of land each year...

...By any measure," he says, "we are replacing old methods of operation with new and improved ones...

...With free fuel, and with a more efficient and economical heating and cooling system, we can offer our customers a real bargain...

...Of all the advantages thermal transfer plants afford, perhaps none is more intriguing than the elimination of solid waste...