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Trash recipe cooks up power
Fox Channel 13, Tampa, FL
Frank Robinson reporting
Monday, 28 May 2007, 9:40 AM EDT
       

TAMPA - If you live in Tampa, your trash -- part of the 1,000 tons a day -- ends up in the McKay Bay Waste-to-Energy Facility.

The plant is operated for the city of Tampa by Wheelabrator Technologies.

"They come in here and then they dump the trash on the concrete floor down there," explained Wheelabrator's Frank Ferraro. "When they dump, they spread it out. So we can visually see what's in there and we pick out things like water heaters or anything else we don't want going into the boilers."

Since 1985, the McKay Bay plant has served two purposes: one to get rid of trash and secondly, to generate power:

" Anytime you have a great facility like this that can generate 20,000 homes in terms of lighting power for them, that's awesome. And I think it's just the beginning," observed David McCary, the city's director of solid waste.

The plant is one of 12 waste-to-energy plants in the state of Florida; there are 89 nationwide.

Here's how it works: garbage is pushed into one of four boilers. The temperature inside reaches 2,500 degrees, heating water pipes and creating steam.

" The steam is collected from all four of these boilers and sent to a turbine generator -- the exact same type of generator you would have in an electric power plant. The steam turns the turbine, which is a series of fan blades, which then turns the generator, which makes electricity," Ferraro continued.

That electricity is sold to TECO, which helps defray some of the cost of operating the plant.

And there's no question that garbage is a fuel source we'll never run out of.

" If we can continue to move toward those inroads to reduce our dependency our foreign oil, fossil fuel. These are the steps that we need to take as a society to move forward," McCary said.

Another step forward is keeping 90 percent of the garbage that comes to the plant out of the landfill: The ash that's left over from the trash is first tested to make sure it passes all state and federal requirements. Then it's trucked to the landfill in southeastern Hillsborough County.


Click here to see the Fox13 video in the "We've got you covered" segment

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