FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FORT MYERS, Fla. (October 1, 2002) – The Board of Lee County Commissioners today unanimously agreed to submit a permit application for the expansion of the county’s Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Facility.
The application fee – to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection – is $50,000. Putting the application together cost nearly $1 million. The project calls for expanding the plant from a capacity of 1,200 tons-per-day to 1,800 tons – by adding a third, 600-ton combustion unit. The estimated cost of the project – including engineering and permitting – will be about $80 million, to be funded with bonds repaid through garbage fees. The plant has consistently operated with overall emissions levels 60-to-80 percent below the stringent standards required by its operating permit.
The WTE Facility was completed in August 1994 and disposes of the county’s garbage by burning it and generating electricity from a steam driven turbine. The facility burns 395,000 tons of garbage a year and generates up to 34 megawatts of electricity – or enough to power about 30,000 homes. Since the plant began operating, residential garbage rates in Lee County have declined from $224 to $203 a year. Covanta Lee Inc., formerly Ogden Martin Systems of Lee Inc., operates the facility through a county contract. The facility has been operating at its maximum capacity during the past three years.
In addition, the county’s decision in the early 1990s not to overbuild the plant, but to leave room for future expansion, benefited citizens and taxpayers. Had the plant been built with an original capacity of 1,800 tons-per-day, the county likely would have needed to ship garbage in from other jurisdictions to meet capacity and bond payments. Importing garbage raises a whole set of problems that the county avoided. While the cost of the third unit is more expensive today, there are many more ratepayers in the county and the additional costs of a larger plant in the early 1990s would have had to been covered by higher garbage rates during the past eight years.
The plant exceeds strict environmental and emissions standards and has been the recipient of many awards since opening, including the Power Engineering and Power Engineering International magazines’ 1995 Project of the Year Award, the 1996 Environmental Citizen of the Year Award from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the 1999 Waste-to-Energy Excellence Gold Award from The Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), and the 2001 Facility Recognition Award from The Solid Waste Processing Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).