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Show the ENTERPRISE Fiscal Watchdog Robert W. Poole, Jr. no0 BY Silk purses from sows ears The waste recycling plant under construction in Hempstead, Long Island, is an environmentalists dream. Not only will it recover ferrous metals, aluminum, and glass (sorted by color) from the towns garbage, but it will also produce steam to generate electricity at a nearby commercial power plant. So thoroughly does the system recycle wastes that only three percent of the original volume of garbage will remain to be trucked away as landfill. It sounds great, you may say, but how much is all this going , to cost and who will end up paying the bills? But heres the best news of all. Far being a subsidized boondoggle, the huge g venture. It Hempstead plant is entirely a private, is being designed, built, financed, and operated by Black Clawson. Co., a subsidiary of Parsons & Whittemore. When fully operational the plant will save Hempstead taxpayers over $5 million a year, compared with the municipal landfill it is replacing. The savings come from several sources. To begin with. Black Clawson will charge the city only $15 a ton to dispose of its refuse, instead of the $18-1- 9 it now pays for landfill. Beyond that, the city will get a rebate of $4 a ton from the sale of glass, metal, and steam. Thus, at 2000 tons per day, the savings will be $15,000 a day or nearly $5.5 million a year. (And the city will also benefit from the property taxes which the plant unlike will pay.) municipal incinerators or landfills Whats happening in Hempstead is not unique. All across the country cities and counties are getting out of the incinerator and landfill business as private firms enter the field. Several factors account for this trend. To begin with, traditional city disposal methods are becoming more and more costly. Most cheap landfill sites have long since been filled up, and its getting harder and harder to find any suitable places in urban areas like San Francisco and Long Island. Aging city incinerators increasingly run afoul of stringent EPA air pollution regulations, and quite a few have actually been shut down by court orders. At the same time the quadrupling of oil prices has given a big boost to research and development that was already under way on methods of getting energy out of garbage. Over 50 percent of municipal refuse consists of readily combustible that can be organic matter - paper, food, plastic, etc. thought of as a very low grade of coal. The problem has been to bum-abl- e develop reliable and economical ways of separating the refuse from the other components glass, metals, etc. This is the kind of challenge that American private enterprise is especially good at taking on. And in the past five years industry has perfected several complex techniques for extracting energy from garbage - techniques which are just now coming on line commercial plants. in Black Clawsons process in Hempstead typifies one of the a usable principal techniques: processing refuse to produce fuel material. This approach, in contrast to some others, since the waste is permits the maximum amount of recycling, shredded and meticulously sorted in the process of producing a e solid or liquid fuel. (Other processes bum uniform, from what everything and then separate out the metals remains.) Quite a few other firms are now producing fuel from refuse. One of the leaders is relatively small Combustion Equipment Associates, whose patented process produces a fine brown Eco-FuII. The fuel can be stored for long powder called than periods without decomposing, bums more efficiently fuel, and can be used in boilers normally raw refuse-derive- d e plant is a 1200 burning oil, gas, or coal. CEAs first ton per day facility in Brockton, Mass. Fuel produced by the 160 miles away in Waterbury, plant is sold to a power company Conn. CEA's second and third plants are underway, in Bridgeport, Conn, and Newark, N.J. Bulk burning has now arrived in America. In Saugus, Mass., Refuse Energy Systems Co. (Resco) has a 1500 ton per to the nearby General day plant in operation, selling steam Electric plant in Lynn. Resco is a joint effort of a private landfill e Corp., a producer of company and the Wheelabrator-Fyrenvironmental control systems. Its Saugus plant illustrates yet another benefit of the private enterprise approach to refuse number of users without disposal: the ability to serve a large town of Saugus is far regard to jurisdictional boundaries. The size too small to produce enough refuse for an economical steam plant. As a private firm, Resco easily signed up a totalof 1500 13 towns and 55 private refuse haulers to come up with the While tons per day needed to make the plant feasible. seem o municipal joint ventures of this sort are possible, they happen a lot more easily in the private marketplace. All in all, the replacement of municipal incinerators and benefits. landfills with private recycling plants offers many a major From the citys standpoint, it means eliminating financial commitment and ensuring that qualified expertise is available to mangage a sophisticated technological system. From the taxpayers standpoint, it means substantial savings or both. In short, in either his tax bills or his garbage rates sows car of refuse disposal private enterprise is turning the into the silk purse of profitable recycling and energy producprofit-makin- East 39th South A Professional Building of Excellence 1521 Space is now being offered in a unique and beautiful building near St. Marks Hospital. 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