Resource Recovery
Facility
The
North County Resource Recovery Facility (NCRRF) is a refuse-derived fuel
(RDF) waste-to-energy (WTE) facility. The facility is owned by the
Solid Waste Authority and operated by Palm Beach Resource Recovery
Corporation, a subsidiary of Babcock and Wilcox Corporation.
The
NCRRF opened in 1989 and currently processes in excess of 850,000 tons
of municipal solid waste per year. The facility successfully provides a
60% reduction by weight in the quantity of waste landfilled. In
the absence of the NCRRF, the Authority’s landfill, which is currently
projected to last until 2021, would have been depleted in 2005.
Facility Highlights
The NCRRF consists of
a tipping floor, an RDF processing plant, an RDF storage building, two
boilers, a turbine generator, pollution control equipment, and
associated facilities and equipment. The design capacity is 2,000
tons per day (624,000 tons per year), although the facility has
consistently surpassed this. The design capacity is based on two of
the three processing lines operating at any one time, but by operating
all three lines on peak days, the operator is able to process at a rate
up to 3,000 tons per day for a limited period of time.
The NCRRF generates
enough electricity to satisfy the power requirements of all of the
Authority’s North Jog Road facilities and approximately 30,000 homes.
The SWA sells the excess power generated by the facility to Florida
Power and Light. In 2007 the SWA received $31 million from the
sale of electricity.
Additional benefits
include the recovery of ferrous metals and aluminum and the diversion of
more than 500,000 tons of garbage per year from the Class 1 landfill.
The plant has state
of the art pollution control equipment, consisting of two dry scrubbers
and two electrostatic precipitators that ensure compliance with all
environmental regulations.
How The Plant Works
MSW is unloaded onto
the tipping floor. Unprocessible waste such as appliances, tires,
vegetative waste, metal and potentially hazardous materials, such as
propane tanks, is removed from the waste stream. This material, which
accounts for 3-4% by weight of the total delivered MSW, is landfilled.
MSW is fed by
front-end loaders or excavators onto conveyors that "feed" the flail
mill. The flail mill tears open any plastic bags, and the garbage falls
onto a conveyor. Ferrous metal is then removed from each line by
an overhead magnet. Aluminum cans are removed by eddy current
separators and transported to recyclers.
The remaining waste
then passes through a rotating trommel screen that removes sand, grit,
dirt and glass (all less than 2 inches in size). These non-combustible
materials are conveyed to a waiting truck and then landfilled.
Any materials not
removed by the trommel, the magnets or the eddy currents go through a
secondary shredder to produce the RDF. The RDF is then conveyed to
a 3,000 ton capacity storage building, where it is fed into the boilers
by way of conveyors.
RDF is burned in one
of two boilers to generate steam, which drives a turbine generator to
produce electricity. |
North County Resource Recovery Facility
A collection vehicle
deposits waste on the
Tipping Floor.
An excavator spreads the waste to identify
and remove unprocessible items.
One of three processing lines where ferrous
metals and aluminum are recovered.
A wider view of the RDF processing plant.
Inside the control room.
Pollution Control Equipment |
