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Lee County Waste to Energy

Our trip to the Lee County Waste to Energy plant addressed a big problem that directly affects our everyday lives: trash and what to do with it. Recently in class, we have been reading about and discussing the impact our everyday lives have on the environment, such as the food we eat and the waste and garbage we produce. Understanding how big our footprints really are is important, so we can be more concious of the small changes we may be able to make. This trip in particular was very rewarding because it provided many sustainable solutions to several complex problems. Not only is the plant getting rid of waste, it is actually turning it in to energy that powers 30,000 homes without any extra emissions.

What I was most suprised to learn at Waste to Energy was the amount of ways trash is sorted and dealt with, in the most sustainable ways possible. There are separate facilities for recycling, horticultural waste, and chemical disposal. In the horticultural waste plant, waste is processed and then sorted. Natural waste becomes compost and fertilizer and construction waste is turned into mulch. Both the mulch and the fertilizer are redistributed throughout Lee County, free for county residents to use outside their homes and local landscapes. Lee County is particularly unique for their processing of construction waste, which many communities have not been able to figure out how to efficiently process into renewable materials, according to our guide. Overall, the waste plant itself seemed as clean as it could possibly be, and it relieved me greatly to see the air filtration systems their emissions travel through.

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