POWER FROM TRASH April 29, 2010 Twenty-five years ago, the New
York City Board of Estimate, under Mayor Edward Koch's
leadership, approved a plan to reduce the need for putting
municipal garbage in landfills by developing facilities to burn
it to create energy. At the same time, the city took the first
steps toward creating a recycling program. Since then, disposal
costs have risen faster than inflation, and the need to find
better methods of getting rid of waste is even greater, say
Norman Steisel, New York City sanitation commissioner from 1978
to 1986, and Benjamin Miller, the Sanitation Department's
director of policy planning from 1989 to 1992. That fledgling
recycling program evolved into the system the city has in place
today, but no waste-to-energy plants were ever built: - Instead,
in 2001, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani closed the city's last remaining
landfill, and since then the city has sent every pound of
nonrecycled municipally collected trash out of the city. - About
15 percent of it goes to a waste-t