The Nashville Thermal Transfer Plant stretches, lonely and shunned, on approximately 12 acres of land alongside First Avenue South. It is surrounded by the sort of places that are considered more presentable, more welcoming, and more friendly—places where you can munch on crab legs, listen to music, or sit on a park bench and observe the passing throng.
Smoke and bits of ash pour out from the transfer plant’s smokestacks. Next door, at Riverfront Park, the clouds of pollution don’t go unnoticed. At Riverfront, Nashvillians gather for fund-raising rallies, civic events, and holiday parties. There, tourists disembark from riverboats and spill forth to visit downtown’s reborn shopping and entertainment district. In such surroundings, the incinerator seems ugly and out of place.
Across the street in the Market Street Apartments, one of the few places in Nashville where people can even attempt to experience a downtown life, the tenants have grown weary of the rumble of loud ash trucks traveling up and down the streets to haul away the plant’s filthy leavings. Much of the ash actually makes it to its dump—but not all of it. Sometimes it drifts out on the air, sifting over the apartment dwellers’ cars.
Thermal, as it is known, is not a popular place. It never has been. It is there to do a job that no one really wants to talk about—or even hear about. Nevertheless, Thermal handles our city’s garbage. It burns the trash Nashville doesn’t truck away to out-of-town landfills. The energy generated by the burning garbage heats and cools 39 downtown buildings.
Thermal exists under the constant scrutiny of environmental activists, who say that burning unseparated garbage—the sort of garbage processed at Thermal—can bilge toxic chemicals and ash out into the air. After all, if a worn-out car battery winds up in the mix of trash, it simply gets burned up along with the rest of the city’s leftovers. Ultimately, the car battery pours out into the air, drifting down into our lungs and covering our buildings in the form of smoke and ash.
Inevitably, Thermal is a place with a loathsome reputation, not so much as a result of undercover investigations or newspaper revelations. Thermal is detestable simply because it is what it is—a place that burns garbage. Downtown is supposed to be clean and tidy. Thermal can’t help but make a mess.
Keepers of the flame
The Nashville Thermal Transfer Corp., which oversees the Thermal Transfer Plant, was created as a private, not-for-profit corporation in 1972 at the behest of then Mayor Beverly Briley. Briley had just returned from vacationing in Germany, where he had seen a similar waste-to-energy facility. Nashville’s first thermal plant cost the city $16.5 million. It was the envy of municipalities nationwide.
At a time when the so-called energy crisis was hitting its full stride, it seemed, Nashville had suddenly discovered a successful way of getting rid of garbage, saving landfill space, and producing energy to boot. The technology was first-rate; the thinking behind it was progressive.
As time went on, however, the warnings of environmentalists increased. As Second Avenue gradually transformed into something decidedly more bourgeois, people began to hang out there. Thermal seemed out of place. Now more than ever, with tourists crowding the Riverfront and Lower Broadway areas, Metro officials are being forced to ask the hard questions about Thermal’s future. They must decide whether Metro should continue to run the plant or sell it to a private company. Another option is to stop burning garbage there altogether and convert the facility into a power plant that burns much cleaner natural gas.
City officials haven’t been able to work up much excitement about the idea of converting Thermal to a gas-burning power plant. The cost would be exorbitant. At the same time, we’d have to find another place to burn Nashville’s garbage. Metro would lose the fees that come from garbage haulers who pay to drop trash at the plant. Spending money and losing money, both at the same time, does not make for a promising combination.
“Metro has got to have one place to dispose of the waste, and right now we’re the only game in town,” says Thermal’s interim general manager Roger Beckham.
It may be a convenient time for city officials to unload Thermal on a private company. The facility is in need of a $25 million upgrade to comply with Environmental Protection Agency regulations that will take effect in May 1999. Five private vendors have shown an interest in taking over the operation of the plant.
The privatization question is one Metro Council may be asked to consider in the near future. In early October an evaluation committee, made up of city officials, will present its report on whether the city should sell or not.
“How it should be done really depends upon the economics,” Beckham says. “I think [the committee will] compare what the current costs are with what our costs will be once the [upgrade] is completed and compare that to the costs from the vendors.”
Some city officials may well be tempted by the idea of selling off the plant. Nashville has other pressing city needs, and the city’s bond capacity has been drained by the costs of the arena and the stadium. Still to be dealt with are plans for a new downtown library and the Metro school desegregation plan.
But critics say that, if Thermal is sold, the city would no longer be in control of decisions about the disposal of Nashville’s solid waste. “I can only speak for myself, but having served on the Thermal board, I feel Thermal is a part of the solid waste solution,” says Metro Council member Janis Sontany, who also serves on the evaluation committee considering proposals from private vendors. “If you bring in a private vendor, you give up some of that control. Without a landfill, selling Thermal is not in the city’s best interests.”
Others say that selling the plant would also take away Metro’s control of a prime stretch of real estate in the middle of the most revitalized section of downtown Nashville. Someday, these critics say, the most valuable thing about Thermal may not be the facility itself, but the land on which it sits.
For still others, Thermal is simply anathema. “It’s 12.5 acres of property that’s just like a huge turd,” says Bruce Wood, an often-quoted environmental activist active in Bring Urban Recycling to Nashville Today (B.U.R.N.T.). A longtime foe of the plant, B.U.R.N.T. is opposed to burning garbage and favors a composting program and the separation of recyclable materials instead. B.U.R.N.T. also advocates converting the plant to an energy source that burns natural gas.
Up in smoke
Critics also frequently cite the fact that the cost of running Thermal has increased. Haulers haven’t been bringing enough waste to the plant in recent years, and, as a result, Metro has been having to spend more to subsidize the operation.
For the fiscal year that just ended in June, Thermal burned an average of 817 tons of garbage a day, and Metro paid the plant $5.8 million. That amounts to a cost of $19.44 to burn each ton of garbage. Just four years earlier, for the year ending in June 1992, Metro paid $9.98 for each ton of trash burned at Thermal.
“Normally, our cost per ton is lower than that, and that’s because normally we burn more waste,” Beckham says. “In the past we have averaged 900 tons a day. The fact that we’re lower than that is strictly because the haulers aren’t bringing enough waste in.”
Less garbage may now be flowing into Thermal, but five years ago many of the city’s political leaders were predicting a serious increase in the flow of trash into the plant. In 1991 Metro Council bitterly debated a proposed expansion of Thermal. The proposal called for spending $30 million to expand the plant itself and $20 million for a separator. The augmented plant would then have been able to burn some 1,300 tons a day. In the end, both the separator and the expansion were defeated. Considering the reduction in the amount of garbage now being burned at Thermal, that defeat was clearly a good thing.
There are, in fact, times when there is no trash at all to burn at Thermal. Last fiscal year, some 1,800 hours passed when there was no garbage to burn. That adds up to 75 days, or 20 percent of the total time that Thermal was just sitting there. The amount of downtime seems shockingly high. When the plant is, at such times, effectively out of business, Thermal burns gas and oil. “We make sure our customers are served whether we have garbage or not,” Beckham says.
The burning issue
Most people familiar with the solid-waste business agree that the discussion of Thermal’s future really cannot take place in a vacuum. Thermal is only one part of Nashville’s waste-disposal system. It is affected by many variables, and all parts of the process are interrelated.
Nashville has a curbside recycling program, but a niggling question remains as to whether that program should be expanded to other parts of Nashville. Recycling has not proven to be a money-maker. Someone will have to justify its expansion.
Nashville must also decide whether or not to open a landfill in Bells Bend on property the city recently purchased for $12 million. Then, when it comes to the thermal plant itself, should a separator be purchased to keep the plant from burning recyclable garbage? Or should the city leave that purchase up to the private company that may eventually buy Thermal?
“I would say the whole issue of solid waste has been deafeningly quiet in this Council,” says Metro Council member Julius Sloss, whose district includes the thermal plant. “I guess,” Sloss continues, “it’s been because the Oilers, and now the arena, have been on the plate. This is a major issue that we’re going to have to deal with. I think we’re eventually going to have to have an entire solid waste system using a landfill, Thermal, and some recycling.”
Since the start of Mayor Phil Bredesen’s administration in 1991, Council members have talked about the need for a solid waste plan. For years before Bredesen took office, landfill siting in Nashville was an emotionally charged political issue, the proverbial hot potato that nobody wanted to touch.
In recent years, the mayor’s official response to requests for a solid waste plan has been essentially, “We have one. We’re hauling garbage out-of-county, and the rest goes to Thermal. You don’t see any garbage on the sidewalks, do you?” Up until now, the system has actually worked, but the pressing need to upgrade Thermal will very likely prompt city officials to consider another move.
“I just think we need to have a clear-cut future policy,” says Vice Mayor Jay West. “I think the debate about Thermal fits into the entire scheme of a solid-waste plan. Thermal can no longer stand by itself as an overall issue.”
