City revisits trash incineration

A single new incinerator facility for all of Juneau's trash and sewage sludge could offer an economical answer to landfilling.

Officials are playing with the idea of piggybacking the city's landfill-bound trash stream onto its incinerator-bound sewage sludge stream, City Manager Rod Swope told the Juneau Assembly's Public Works and Facilities Committee on Monday.

Swope said the city set aside $11,000 to have environmental engineering experts revisit Juneau's incineration and plasma gasification options through a combined waste stream approach. The consultants, with the California-based firm SCS Engineers, will be in town to present their findings in about a month.

The impetus for the reexamination was that city officials recently learned the 18-year-old sewage sludge incinerator at the Juneau-Douglas Treatment Plant is in need of replacement and is expected to fail within five years. Public Works Director Joe Buck estimated the cost of a new sewage incinerator to be between $15 million and $17 million.

Meanwhile, incineration of Juneau's trash ended in 2004 because of cost, age of the incinerators and toughening environmental rules. Amid the sight and smell of the growing landfill near Lemon Creek, locals have criticized the decision. But city officials said building a new trash incinerator would drive up the cost of garbage disposal to an unsustainably high rate.

"The light came on," Buck said. "I said, wait a minute, what if we pulled that capital cost out?"

Swope stressed that it's just a concept at this point. Buck said the consultants will be presenting a "letter of professional opinion" rather than a full-blown feasibility study, though it should give policymakers an idea which direction to go.

Traditional incineration of garbage is handled differently than sewage, so a combined incinerator would presumably be more sophisticated and expensive. Plasma gasification technology, which has been used in industrial settings for decades but in recent years has been billed as a clean waste-to-energy solution, promises to handle both waste streams indiscriminately.

Industry experts have said that Juneau's garbage stream is too small to financially sustain a plasma gasification plant, though Don West, a marketing consultant with the company Plasma Waste Recycling, has said that pooling trash regionally and adding other waste that isn't typically landfill bound, such as sewage sludge and medical waste, could round out the business model.

Assemblyman Randy Wanamaker reported to the committee that the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and city of Anchorage are considering a joint plasma gasification facility for their trash.