Recently, we visited a Waste for Energy (WfE) facility in the City of Tulsa. This plant is operated by fully private company, Covanta https://www.covanta.com/. We were hosted by the Director of Business Management of Covanta in Tulsa, Matt Newman and he delivered a very interesting presentation regarding Covanta’s Plant operation in Tulsa.

Waste for Energy facility in Tulsa is not accepting hazardous waste such as radioactive contaminated waste, chemical contaminated waste and bio-hazard waste including those coming from the hospitals. Covanta Plant can take City of Tulsa waste from the neighbourhood areas, some manufactures, and even from public service or private entity outside of Oklahoma State. It happens since Covanta Plant is the only facility in Southwest Region.

People may have heard about waste to energy facility and they may have different responses on that. It may have the same system operation but it operates differently depends on many factors. Like Covanta, it is not necessary to separate the waste (organic and inorganic) because they found it is expensive. Instead, they will burn the waste all together and separate the residue like ferrous and non-ferrous materials. In fact, they can use the residue for other purposes like landfill cover and road aggregates.

Furthermore, Covanta does not really to pay for the waste but even they will get paid for waste that coming to the plant to be destroyed. Eventually, they will get money from selling the energy or the steam. Also, they could get money by selling ferrous, non-ferrous materials and residues to landfill or road construction. It can be the other way around but it is found that WfE can reduce the waste up to 90% and can be profitable enough.

So if we are getting tired with our waste problems and feel too much effort to separate our waste. Then, we might need to consider about Waste to Energy facility. Moreover, the waste they use here just look the same with the waste in our country.