Key Facts & Benefits of Advanced Thermal Recycling

Landfill Diversion Benefits

The case for Advanced Thermal Recycling (ATR®) rests on numbers a council can audit. Landfilling is not sustainable, and ATR® attains 99% landfill diversion, the highest diversion in the industry.

The Problem With Landfill

• Landfills create serious environmental threats to groundwater and greenhouse gas emissions.
• Landfills generate methane, which is 21x more potent than CO2.
• Landfilling squanders much of the potential renewable energy and reusable resource value in solid waste.
• Landfills are getting full, and new landfills are virtually impossible to permit due to environmental concerns.
• Landfill hauling and tipping fees will continue to rise with rising fuel and land costs.

Recycling coupled with waste conversion is the most responsible and sustainable solution, and Europe leads the world in combining curbside recycling with energy from waste facilities.

What Europe Already Demonstrates

More than 60% of post-recycled waste is processed, combusted but with waste heat and power recovery, in 425 plants throughout the 27-nation European Union, compared with 10% in 87 plants in the US. It is law in 14 countries of the EU that there is no landfilling of waste without prior recycling and energy recovery. Energy generated from MSW in the EU exceeds solar and wind combined, and each ton of MSW equals the energy content of one third of a ton of coal. Multiple studies in both the US and Europe confirm that communities with EfW facilities also enjoy higher recycling rates.

How ATR® Reaches 99% Diversion

Advanced Thermal Recycling® (ATR®) resets the standard for the management and disposal of MSW. It is a proprietary process that achieves the lowest environmental footprint of any commercial EfW technology operating in the western hemisphere, and the diversion figure is built from stacked recovery steps: a community-based curbside recycling program; additional recycling in a pre-processing material recovery facility (MRF) to recover remaining recyclable materials from the waste stream delivered to the ATR® facility; combustion of non-recyclable materials to produce power; treatment of residual bottom ash to recover ferrous and non-ferrous metals as well as glass, enabling beneficial re-use of the resulting bottom ash aggregate in concrete products or as construction aggregate; and treatment of fly ash to recover metals, alongside treatment of flue gas to recover hydrochloric acid and gypsum. From each ton of MSW received, less than 20 pounds remain for ultimate disposal.

Emissions and Engineering Pedigree

ATR® delivers the lowest air emissions for all regulated pollutants: criteria pollutants, air toxics and organics. State-of-the-art combustion system design and control, coupled with the most sophisticated flue gas treatment system, exceeds the equipment requirements of Federal MACT standards. The technology is based on 60+ years of experience in solid waste, coal, hazardous waste and industrial plant design and construction.