Why waste to energy?
Waste to energy is an environmentally sound and economically competitive means of waste disposal, which is preferred to landfilling. Landfills use precious space and leachate contamination of ground water is always a possibility. In a small area of land such as Long Island, space preservation is a serious issue. Waste that enters an Ogden facility is reduced by 90 percent of its original volume. The remaining 10% is an inert ash. This reduction of the original volume of waste saves annually hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of landfill space. Long Island, NY is a 100-mile stretch of land. The island, which begins with bedroom communities for greater New York and ends in truck farms, supports a tremendous beachfront tourism industry. Some residents still depend upon well water as a source of drinking water. Consequently, with the threat of waste contaminating its groundwater supplies, Long Island closed and capped its landfills some years ago.
