FEBRUARY 19, 2010 - SOUTHEAST RESOURCE RECOVERY FACILITY PROCESSES 10 MILLIONTH TON OF WASTE INTO RENEWABLE ENERGY
Long Beach, CA, February 22, 2010 - The Long Beach Energy-from-Waste facility, the Southeast Resource Recovery Facility (SERRF), recently celebrated processing 10 million tons of post-recycled municipal solid waste into clean, renewable energy.
“SERRF has played an integral role in the City of Long Beach’s growth and development in the last 22 years. In its history, the facility has processed enough municipal solid waste to fill Angel Stadium in Anaheim approximately seven times. Instead, we have converted that waste into much needed renewable energy,” said Charles R. Tripp, Bureau Manager, City of Long Beach-SERRF. “By avoiding the landfilling of municipal solid waste, we have saved precious space from being landfilled and prevented the energy value of this material from being forever wasted.”
The facility is owned by SERRF JPA consisting of the City of Long Beach and the County Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles and operated by Covanta Long Beach Renewable Energy Corp., a subsidiary of Covanta Energy.
In the 1980s, the closure of a nearby landfill led the City of Long Beach to decide that the exportation of its solid waste to other communities was unsustainable and to build the Energy-from-Waste facility, SERRF. As a result, the facility has prevented 10 million tons of waste from being landfilled and an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases from being emitted into the atmosphere, the equivalent of planting more than 200 million tree seedlings. On a daily basis, the facility processes 1,380 tons of municipal solid waste per day into 36 megawatts of energy, enough energy to power 35,000 homes. The facility has also played an important role in the City’s recycling efforts, recovering approximately more than 200,000 tons of metals in its history.
“We are proud to join the City of Long Beach and Los Angeles Counties in celebrating this important milestone. Long before it was fashionable, the city recognized the importance of an integrated waste management system and decided to increase recycling and recover energy from what remains rather than export their waste out of the city,” said Christopher Baker, regional business manager of Covanta Energy. “That visionary thinking has allowed us to generate clean, renewable energy for the residents of the City of Long Beach, avoid greenhouse gas emissions that would otherwise have been created by landfilling the waste, and saved valuable open space from being trashed.”
About Covanta
Covanta Energy is an internationally recognized owner and operator of large-scale Energy-from-Waste and renewable energy projects and a recipient of the Energy Innovator Award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Covanta’s 45 Energy-from-Waste facilities provide communities with an environmentally sound solution to their solid waste disposal needs by using that municipal solid waste to generate clean, renewable energy. Annually, Covanta’s modern Energy-from-Waste facilities safely and securely convert approximately 20 million tons of waste into more than 9 million megawatt hours of clean, renewable electricity and create more than 10 billion pounds of steam sold to a variety of industries. For more information, visit www.covantaholding.com.