You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, shortwaver's Emily Kwong here with Angela Zhang, a reporter who's been on our team for the last few months through the Stanford Health Equity Media Fellowship. Hey, Angela. Hey, Emily. Hey. So lately, I've been biking to work and I'm getting stuck behind the trash truck that comes down my street. And I'm trying to dodge a smell,

which is a fun time. But I've also been wondering, where does all of this trash even go?

I assume it goes to a landfill, right? Well, that's what I thought at first, too. But in some places

around the country, a portion of our trash goes to an incinerator. Wait, so our trash is getting

burned? Yeah, it's getting burned. About 12%

of the trash we generate in the United States get sent to these plants called waste to energy

facilities. They convert the energy, they get from burning the trash into actual electricity that we

can use on our grid, which is kind of wild to me. And the conversion of this waste to energy, is this a new technology? Not really. So people have been burning trash for a long time. Like New York City had trash incinerators way back in the 1800s. I remember this when I was a kid. You would take your garbage and throw it down a shoot that was next to the elevator shaft. And that was

literally just burning it. So that's Marco Castaldi. He's a professor of chemical engineering

at the City College of New York. So burning the trash, not new. But using the burning process

as a deliberate source of energy, that's newer since the 1960s. And to be clear, we no longer

have incinerators in residential buildings. Correct. Yes, you're not carrying your trash to the incinerator in your building. At least last time I lived in New York, this is a shot a thing. Yes. Still, Emily, not everyone's a fan of waste of energy. There's actually this big counter movement of advocates that have successfully shut down plants all over the country.

I talked to Jessica Roth, who's part of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, or Gaia.

Waste to energy, quote unquote, is the most expensive and the dirtiest way of generating energy that we have.

It's incredibly inefficient.

They keep saying that this is an

important piece of the puzzle, and in fact, it's barely makes a blip on the radar. Today on the show,

we dig deeper into the story of where our trash goes. How does an incinerator work? And is the story

as clean as it looks? You're listening to Shortwave,

the science podcast from NPR. So, Angela, we are talking about waste to energy plants. These are

facilities that can burn our trash to create electricity.

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