Covanta Cashes In on Energy Sales

Covanta Niagara L.P. with its giant smokestack burns garbage and emits pollutants for their neighbors to breathe.

About 24 percent of Covanta's profits come from generating energy, according to Covanta's annual stockholder's reports.

Another 10 percent comes from selling recycled metals and the rest, 66 percent, comes from what their business is really about: getting paid to take municipal garbage and burn it.

But energy sales are an important part of Covanta's business.

Heat being used to burn garbage is captured as steam and used to drive steam turbines that are part of a power plant. And heat from one ton of waste can be used to generate 0.55 megawatt hours of electricity.

By that measure, Covanta Niagara could produce 440,000 megawatt hours of electricity.

This could be enough to give free electricity to all the homes in the neighborhood.

Instead they sell it.

Covanta's 2011 annual report claims that their 41 facilities processed 19 million tons of waste and generated 10 million megawatt hours of electricity.