Resource recovery January 29, 2008

As part of our ongoing fascination with all things environmental and efficient, about half of our office toured the Washington and Ramsey county Resource Recovery facility in Newport MN, just a few minutes southeast of our office in downtown St. Paul.

All five of us were quite captivated during our tour, which included a stop in the control room and the tipping floor, and we saw the refuse-derived-fuel getting compacted into trucks headed for Mankato and Redwing.

Our tour guide, Mark, informed us that only about 10 percent of municipal solid waste is organic or food based; the remaining 90 percent is primarily packaging. (We saw a lot of plastic, cardboard, and paper.)

We were also surprised to hear that most of the media attention on waste-to-energy facilities is negative. It's baffling, considering they've kept the equivalent of about 250 Metrodome's full of waste out of landfills. As, Mark said, that would be a big hole.

And, yes, that's vinyl siding headed for the incinerator in the photo. We were a little concerned about dioxins from combustion (see previous post on plastics), but one fact helped ease our consciences: Just one family using a backyard burn barrel will emit more dioxins per year than a 200-ton-per-day waste-to-energy facility. Wow.

Ramsey county and Resource Recovery
Reduce.org
Green Guardian: a Twin Cities waste and recycling resource
Recycling Association of Minnesota
Xcel Energy bulb recycling program
Plastic bag recycling in the Twin Cities