Greenest state behind the waste-to-energy race

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Government officials from around the world used to come to this port city to catch a glimpse of the future: Two-story piles of trash would disappear into a furnace and eventually be transformed into electricity to power thousands of homes.

Nowadays, it's U.S. officials going to Canada, Japan and parts of Western Europe to see the latest advances.

The Long Beach plant, for all its promise when it began operations roughly 20 years ago, still churns out megawatts. But it is a relic, a symbol of how California, one of America's greenest states, fell behind other countries in the development of trash-to-energy technology.

"I am having a hard time explaining why California is so far behind," said Eugene Tseng Tseng, a University of California, Los Angeles law professor who spent the last three months leading delegations on overseas tours.

While so-called biorefineries have blossomed abroad, concerns that technique would undermine recycling efforts and create worse air pollution stalled efforts in California. With space for garbage dumps dwindling, proponents of a new breed of the technology hope to win over detractors.

Los Angeles County officials want to build three plants at a total cost of $200 million to demonstrate how far the technology has come as they scramble for alternatives to closing the world's largest landfill and shipping trash four hours by rail to an abandoned goldmine near the Mexico border.

If they prove successful at reducing waste and producing power, there's no guarantee they'll usher in a new wave of garbage-gobbling technology.

Efforts to pass legislation that would have given waste-to-energy plants credit toward recycling and renewable energy goals so cities could meet state mandates hit a snag this year when some environmentalists argued that such facilities are no different from incinerators, which do not receive credits.

"We have the most aggressive goals for recycling and renewable energies but we've also got groups fighting us on solar, wind and now this," said Coby Skye with the county's Environmental Programs Division. "There are no other options if we can't get these technologies moving forward."

Part of the reason that Europe and Asia are now ahead of the U.S. on such technology is that they had to grapple with the lack of dump space years earlier. Many are also signatories to the Kyoto Protocol and must reduce greenhouse gas that are produced as waste decomposes in landfills.