Discussing the environmental impact of waste, strict regulations, and the modernization of landfills. Revenue Generation at Landfills - Exploring the revenue streams of landfills, including tipping fees, and the financial aspects of landfill operations. Challenges and Costs of Landfill Operations - Examining the expenses and regulatory obligations associated with landfill operations, including post-closure maintenance. Tipping Fees and Regional Variances - Analyzing the variations in tipping fees across different regions and the factors influencing these variances. Private Ownership and Industry Growth - Exploring the transition to private ownership of landfills and the growth of the waste management industry. Innovative Approaches in Waste Management - Discussing innovative techniques such as landfill mining, reclamation, and energy recovery from landfill gas. Waste-to-Energy Facilities - Exploring the process and environmental impact of waste-to-energy facilities, including combustion and energy recovery. Corporate Adoption of Waste-to-Energy - Examining the corporate adoption of waste-to-energy facilities, including the disposal of returns and the environmental considerations. Environmental and Economic Considerations - Analyzing the environmental and economic factors influencing the choice between waste-to-energy and landfills. Global Perspectives on Waste Management - Comparing waste management practices and waste-to-energy adoption in different countries, particularly Europe and the U.S. Environmental Impact of Waste Incineration - Examining the environmental impact and regulation of waste incineration, including emissions and toxins. Landfill Operations and Community Impact - Exploring the impact of landfill operations on communities and the considerations surrounding waste-to-energy facilities. Economic Factors in Waste Management - Analyzing the economic factors influencing waste management decisions, including costs and revenue generation. Waste Management and Energy Recovery - Discusses the financial considerations of waste management, the transportation of waste to energy facilities, and the environmental impact of waste energy and landfills. Amazon Returns and Waste Reduction - Explores the impact of Amazon returns on waste management and the importance of keeping materials out of the waste stream. Waste to Energy Plants and River Cleanup - Discusses the role of waste to energy plants as a landfill alternative and the efforts to clean up trash from waterways, including the use of river cleanup devices. Plastic Waste in Rivers and Waste Generation - Addresses the issue of plastic waste entering the ocean through rivers, the projected increase in waste generation, and efforts to capture trash from rivers. Waste Management Challenges in Low-Income Countries - Highlights the challenges of waste management in low-income countries, including the open dumping and burning of waste, and the migration of waste into rivers. Plastic Leakage from Middle-Income Countries - Explores the contribution of middle-income countries to oceanic waste and the areas where plastic leakage to the oceans is most prevalent. Primary Sources of River Plastic Export - Discusses the primary sources of river plastic export into the ocean and the findings of a 2021 study on plastic pollution. Efforts to Tackle Plastic Pollution - Explores the efforts of organizations to address plastic pollution closer to the source and the development of river cleanup technologies. Future of River Cleanup Systems - Discusses the future of river cleanup systems and the goal of addressing the waste problem upstream to eliminate the need for river cleanup devices. EV Battery Recycling and Electrification - Explores the challenges and opportunities of EV battery recycling, the growth of the EV market, and the importance of recycling used EV batteries. Domestic Sourcing of Critical Battery Minerals - Addresses the sourcing of critical battery minerals, the impact of President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, and the potential for battery refurbishment to become a significant business. Lifecycle Management of EV Battery Packs - Discusses the lifecycle management of EV battery packs, including repair, remanufacturing, repurposing, and recycling, and the role of companies in this space.

The Business of Waste Management - Exploring the waste management industry, its market growth, and the shift towards waste-to-energy facilities. Environmental Impact and Regulations

# Waste Management: Turning Trash into Treasure

## The Growing Waste Management Industry

The waste management market is expected to grow into a $229 billion industry by 2027, making it a profitable and booming business. With advancements in technology and government support, the industry has seen significant growth in recent years.

### Waste to Energy

- Waste management facilities are now turning to waste to energy or energy recovery processes to generate electricity from burning trash.
- This method not only reduces the amount of waste in landfills but also provides a sustainable way to produce energy.
- Landfills and waste to energy facilities play a crucial role in managing the 292 million tons of waste generated by Americans each year.

## Landfills: A Modern Approach

Modern landfills are designed to protect the environment and human health. They are equipped with advanced engineering and strict regulations to ensure proper waste management.

### Landfill Operations

- Landfills charge trucks dropping off their garbage based on their weight per ton, generating revenue through tipping fees.
- Tipping fees have seen steady growth over the past four decades, making landfills a profitable investment.
- Private companies have replaced municipal governments in owning and operating the majority of landfills across the U.S.

## Landfill Mining and Reclamation

- Landfill mining and reclamation processes extract and reprocess materials from older landfills, turning waste into valuable resources.
- This process has the potential to recover metals and other materials, reducing the need for mining virgin materials.

## Waste to Energy Facilities

- Waste to energy facilities use combustion to generate electricity from waste, providing a sustainable alternative to landfills.
- These facilities also recover metals and use steam for heating and cooling, making them an efficient and environmentally friendly solution for waste management.

## Environmental Impact

While waste to energy facilities produce carbon and toxic ash, advanced air pollution control systems have significantly reduced emissions, making them a more environmentally friendly option compared to landfills.

### The Future of Waste Management

The waste management industry is continuously evolving, with a focus on sustainability and resource recovery. As the industry continues to grow, it is crucial to view waste as a resource rather than just a disposal problem.

## River Cleanup and Environmental Impact

- River cleanup devices, such as trash wheels and barriers, are being deployed in various locations to remove trash from waterways and prevent it from reaching the ocean.
- The majority of plastic pollution in the ocean originates from rivers, with up to 2.97 million tons of plastic entering the ocean through rivers annually.
- Middle-income countries like the Philippines, India, and Malaysia contribute the most to oceanic waste, highlighting the need for global efforts to address the issue.

### EV Battery Recycling and Reuse

- With the rise of electric vehicles (EVs), the demand for EV batteries is expected to increase significantly.
- Companies like Spears New Technologies are focusing on extending the economic life of EV battery packs through repair, refurbishment, and recycling, reducing the need for mining critical minerals.

The newsletter provides valuable insights into the waste management industry, highlighting the profitable opportunities and sustainable solutions for managing waste. As the industry continues to expand, it is essential to prioritize environmental sustainability and resource recovery for a more sustainable future. Additionally, addressing the impact of plastic pollution in rivers and the recycling and reuse of EV batteries are crucial steps towards a cleaner and more sustainable environment.

"Unlocking Profitable and Sustainable Solutions in Waste Management"

The amount of plastics in all the rivers around the world

The growth of the waste management market

The surge in the amount of waste produced

Landfills have a greater environmental impact than waste energy facilities.

Landfills have a lesser environmental impact than waste energy facilities.

Landfills and waste energy facilities have the same environmental impact.

The environmental impact of landfills and waste energy facilities cannot be compared.

- The waste management market is expected to grow to a $229 billion industry by 2027
- Waste to energy facilities are burning trash to generate electricity
- Plastics in rivers may exceed the amount in oceans
- Strict environmental regulations and surge in waste production are driving market expansion
- Landfills make revenue through tipping fees, with average fees increasing over the years
- Private companies like Waste Management and Republic Services lead the industry, with stock prices doubling in the past 5 years
- Landfills are often privately owned and require significant investment upfront
- Landfills are regulated for 30 years after closure, with financial obligations still in place
- Some government jurisdictions have transitioned to hybrid ownership with private companies operating landfills
- Landfills are a profitable industry if managed correctly, but also require ongoing financial commitment and regulatory compliance

- Landfill mining and reclamation can be profitable, but also a challenge
- Landfill gas to energy projects generate electricity and receive government subsidies
- Waste to energy combustion is used by companies like Amazon to dispose of returns
- Waste management is a growing industry, with a focus on sustainability and reducing landfill waste
- Waste to energy facilities provide a net reduction of greenhouse gases compared to landfills

- Landfills have a greater environmental impact than waste energy facilities
- The US is one of the most wasteful developed countries
- Recycling and composting are better, but not all materials can go that route
- The US relies more on landfills than waste energy facilities
- Waste energy facilities produce clean electricity and recover metals from waste
- The facilities have advanced air pollution control systems
- Waste to energy is more expensive than landfills, but also a moneymaker
- Waste to energy facilities are built in disproportionately poor communities
- Landfills in the US are big business, with companies like Waste Management and Republic Services outperforming the market
- Europe imposes a tax on landfill waste, leading to more reliance on waste to energy facilities
- Waste to energy is also a moneymaker, with estimated revenues of $20 to $30 per ton of waste
- Incineration is one of the most expensive commercial ways to generate energy and handle waste.

- Amazon's disposal of returns through landfill or burning for energy is a concern
- Waste energy facilities are located in the northeast US, Florida, and Minnesota
- Amazon is working towards a goal of 0 product disposal
- Trash from rivers contributes to oceanic waste, with up to 2.97 million tons of plastic entering the ocean through rivers annually
- Companies are developing systems to capture trash from rivers
- Baltimore's trash wheels have picked up 2,000 tons of trash and debris, incinerated in a waste-to-energy facility
- The Ocean Cleanup is focusing on river cleanup technologies in addition to cleaning the Great Pacific garbage patch

- The Ocean Cleanup is working to rid the oceans of plastic, focusing on rivers as the fastest and most cost-effective way to prevent further plastic from entering the ocean.
- They have developed river cleanup devices, including the Interceptor Original and the interceptor barrier, to collect and manage trash in rivers.
- Alphamers also makes a version of a river barrier to capture plastic in rivers, using a low-tech and low-cost approach.
- The World Bank is exploring ways to incentivize citizens and governments to pay for long-term waste management solutions.
- A company in Oklahoma is working on recycling and salvaging critical minerals from used electric vehicle batteries, as the need for battery recycling and reusing grows with the increasing number of electric vehicles on the road.

- Companies like Redwood Materials, Lifecycle, and American Battery Technology have developed processes to recycle lithium ion batteries
- The demand for battery recycling is expected to increase significantly as the electric vehicle market grows
- Spears New Technologies specializes in extending the economic life of EV battery packs and offers end-to-end lifecycle management services
- The company has facilities in Oklahoma City, Las Vegas, and Detroit, and plans to expand to the East Coast
- S&T has serviced over 240,000 packs and recycled 3,000 packs
- The company works with non-Tesla electric vehicle OEMs, such as GM, Ford, Stellantis, Porsche, Volkswagen, Nissan, Toyota, and Volvo
- The lifetime of an EV battery is estimated to be 12 to 15 years, but the reuse lifetime can range from 5 to 30 years
- By 2050, the demand for graphite, lithium, and cobalt is expected to increase by 500 percent
- Battery refurbishment is becoming a profitable business, with the intrinsic value of recycled battery packs exceeding the cost of recycling
- The hope is to eventually reach a point where a significant majority of battery materials are recycled from old batteries
- Some critics believe the EV battery recycling business could be booming too quickly, but progress is happening rapidly in this emerging space.

- Waste management market expected to reach $229 billion by 2027
- Waste to energy facilities burning trash for electricity
- Plastics in rivers may exceed ocean amounts
- Strict regulations and waste surge driving market expansion
- Landfills generate revenue through tipping fees
- Private companies like Waste Management and Republic Services lead industry
- Landfills regulated for 30 years after closure
- Some government jurisdictions transitioning to hybrid ownership of landfills
- Waste to energy facilities reduce greenhouse gases compared to landfills
- US relies more on landfills than waste energy facilities
- Europe imposes tax on landfill waste, leading to more reliance on waste to energy
- Amazon working towards zero product disposal
- Trash from rivers contributes to oceanic waste
- Companies developing systems to capture trash from rivers
- The Ocean Cleanup focusing on river cleanup technologies
- World Bank exploring ways to incentivize waste management solutions
- Companies developing processes to recycle lithium ion batteries
- Demand for battery recycling expected to increase with electric vehicle market growth
- Battery refurbishment becoming profitable business
- Hope to reach point where majority of battery materials are recycled from old batteries
- Critics concerned about rapid growth of EV battery recycling business

CNBC Marathon explores the economics of waste management and how the United States is solving its trash problem.

In 2019, the North American waste management market reached $208 billion. Thanks to advancements in modern chemistry and support from municipal governments, landfills have seen astonishing financial success in recent years.

Burning waste to make energy is a $10 billion industry in the U.S., and the fastest growing part of the business is waste from big companies like Amazon, Subaru, Quest Diagnostics and American Airlines. They’re part of a growing corporate movement toward “zero landfill” as pressure mounts to reach sustainability requirements.

It’s estimated that every year, millions of tons of plastic enter the ocean through rivers, and as global waste generation increases, the problem is poised to worsen. But a host of companies from Baltimore, Maryland to Bengaluru, India are working on the issue, developing novel methods to capture trash from rivers before it reaches the ocean.

Dozens of electric vehicles are scheduled to debut in the next few years and over 300 million electric vehicles are expected to be on the world’s roads by 2030. The lifetime for an EV battery is estimated to be 12 to 15 years in moderate climates, but that doesn't mean the batteries end up in landfills when they die.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:48 How Trash Makes Money In The U.S. (Published July 2021)
15:59 How Amazon, American Airlines And Subaru Burn Waste To Make Energy (Published May 2022)
32:24 How To Clean Up The World’s Most Polluted Rivers (Published August 2022)
46:16 Where Do EV Batteries Go When They Die? (Published March 2023)

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#CNBC

The Business Of Trash | CNBC Marathon

Anytime when I'm going to a landfill, I talk to my kids.

I tell them, you smell the trash and I smell money.

By 2027, the waste management market is expected to grow into a $229 billion industry.

There's an entirely different type of waste management facility that's burning trash instead of burying it.

This combustion is known as waste to energy or energy recovery because it's used to generate electricity.

I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of plastics in all the rivers around the world is much more than all the plastics that is in the oceans.

If you're going to call yourself a green company, you don't want your batteries piling up in junkyards.

The degradation of an EV battery pack is 1 of the biggest questions of the industry.

In 2019, the North American waste management market reached $208 billion.

Strict environmental regulations, as well as a surge in the amount of waste produced, is expected to expand the market even further.

Anytime when I'm going to a landfill, I talk to my kids, you know, I talk to my son and daughter, they say, ah, yucky, you're going to come back as a smelly.

I told them, you smell the trash and I smell money.

America remains 1 of the most wasteful countries in the world, generating 239 million tons of garbage every year, about 16 or 1,700 pounds per person.

While some view it as a threat to our environment and society, others see it as an opportunity.

It's a difficult industry, but it is profitable.

And I think that is why there are so many private companies that are involved in waste management.

Thanks to advancements in modern chemistry and the support from the government, landfills have seen astonishing financial success in recent years, raking in millions of dollars in profit.

Private solid waste management companies like Waste Management and Republic Services have shown significant growth over the last 5 years.

They've learned how to be best in class businesses.

And as they did that, what you saw was this growth occurring in new customer growth, new business formation linked with consumerism, consumer engagement, housing, and the garbage industry.

Public traded stocks outperformed the market handily between 2015 and 2019.

And underpinning it is a meaningful improvement in their free cash flow conversion.

So how exactly are landfills turning profit out of garbage and just how much money can be made.

When people think of landfills, they usually imagine an endless field of garbage emitting a terrible odor and housing all manner of pests.

But modern sanitary landfills today are much more nuanced and a lot less smelly.

A modern landfill is a civil engineering marvel.

These are extraordinarily well engineered.

They're designed to protect human health and the environment, and at the same time contain and manage the waste that we generate at 4 and a half pounds a person per day in the United States.

If you walk past the landfill and there is a smell, that means they are doing something wrong.

Strict regulations and the work by the EPA have changed landfills to become more modern and sanitary than ever.

The Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, combined with the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, dramatically expanded the federal government's role in managing waste disposal.

Open dumps where garbage is dropped off without any protection are now illegal.

When waste is brought to a sanitary landfill, they are disposed into an open section known as the cell.

This cell is protected by a layer of reinforced plastic known as the liner that prevents any harmful liquids from leaking out.

Any liquid from the waste is collected at the bottom of the landfill and is removed via a series of pipes, gravels, and sand.

Meanwhile, above ground, trash is constantly compressed within the cell using bulldozers and other compaction equipment, using daily covers to protect the trash from sun, rain, and pests until the cell reaches its max capacity.

Once that happens, either a new cell begins on top or a final cover is placed over.

The site is then continuously monitored for up to 30 years to ensure everything is environmentally sound.

There is the potential for the liner system to leak, for example, over long periods of time.

And probably more likely the cover system, you know, is just going to be subject to that settling and weathering and different things.

So there's the potential for gas emissions.

You want to be monitoring a landfill as long as there's the potential for gas or liquid emissions.

Landfills make a majority of their revenue even before the garbage makes its way to the pile of trash.

Through a tipping fee or a gate fee, landfills charge trucks dropping off their garbage based on their weight per ton.

This fee acts as the lifeblood of most landfills across the United States.

Tipping fee gets its connotation because the truck comes in and tips, if you will, and it literally tips up when the trash is driven out of the trailer through what's known as a walking floor.

And that is the principal source of income.

In 2020, municipal solid waste landfills had an average tipping of $53.72 per ton.

That translates to roughly $1.4 million a year in approximate average gross revenue for small landfills and $43.5 million a year for large landfills just from gate fees.

And tipping fees have seen steady growth over the past 4 decades.

In 1982, the national average tipping fee sat at $8.07 per ton, or about $23 when adjusted for inflation.

That's nearly a 133 percent increase in 35 years.

Tipping fees vary widely depending on where the landfill is located.

For instance, the South Central region in the U.S.

Has the lowest average tipping fee of $39.66 per ton, with some states like Arkansas reporting a fee as low as $30.53 per ton.

On the other hand, the average tipping fee in the Northeast is almost double that at $68.69 per ton, with states like Delaware reporting a fee as high as $85 per ton.

There's a list of reasons, but at its simplest level, is scarcity.

So where tipping fees are the highest, I would venture that you have extraordinary dense populations and very few disposal options.

The other difference is the cost of building.

If I'm in western Pennsylvania dealing with rock formations at very shallow level and I literally go 50 miles west and

Ohio, the cost of building a landfill in western Pennsylvania versus Ohio are dramatically different.

While tipping fees make landfills sound like a risk-free business, they are still quite an expensive investment.

It can cost about $1.1 to $1.7 million just to construct, operate, and close a landfill.

And there are financial obligations that must be met even after the landfill has been closed entirely.

There was a major regulatory change that happened in the 70s called the Resource Conservation Recovery Act.

By 1994, every landfill that was in service in North America had to adhere to something called Subtitle D, which is the design, operation, and then the life cycle financial assurance obligations of managing and overseeing that site for 30 years after it closes.

Every business owner, whoever owns the business, they make money up to the time it's working.

Then even after closure, they have to pay the maintenance fee, which is around $1 million without making money for 30 years.

Today, private companies have replaced municipal governments to own and operate the majority of landfills across the U.S.

In 1988, about 7,900 landfills were publicly owned.

By 2009, that number had fallen to about 1,900.

It's now estimated that more than half of all municipal solid waste landfills are privately owned, with the industry controlling 85 to 90 percent of permitted capacity.

Landfills are often owned by private companies.

And I think it's because the trend has been to go larger and larger.

So the small neighborhood dump, you know, can't can't exist because the regulation in the sophistication of the design.

So we're tending to see large landfills, which we do require a lot of investment up front.

2 private companies, Waste Management and Republic Services, lead the solid waste management sector.

Waste Management says it owns nearly 300 landfills across the US, while Republic Service says it operates just over 180 out of the 2,627 landfills across America.

Together, the 2 companies have seen staggering performance in the market, with both companies' stock prices doubling in the past 5 years.

If you take the Great Recession and sort of lay the framework of how to garbage perform post the Great Recession, what you'll discover, there's a five-year window up to 2014 where they did okay.

They were, you know, they're in the green, matching or slightly outperforming the market.

But the significant outperformance begins in 2014 through 2019.

They've learned how to be best-in-class businesses.

And as they did that, what you saw was this growth occurring in new customer growth, new business formation, linked with consumerism, consumer engagement, housing, and the garbage industry.

And underpinning it is a meaningful improvement in their free cashflow conversion.

Some government jurisdictions have also transitioned to a hybrid ownership.

In places like Wake County, North Carolina, landfills are owned by the county but operated by GFL Environmental, a private company.

So if you give it fully privatized, A private company will try to go through the regulation, but their main focus would be making money.

To me, the combination of both is the best choice.

Because that way, the city has some control over the landfill company.

But the city also needs to make sure that not only the profit, the environmental sustainability, environmental cases and people's life, everything is maintained in the right way.

Private companies have also discovered new ways beyond tipping fees to turn profit out of their garbage.

Landfill mining and reclamation, a process of extracting and reprocessing materials from older landfills, is 1 of them.

Certainly looking at waste as a resource is the best thing for the economy.

It's the best thing for the environment, for health.

Putting metal in a landfill just makes absolutely no sense.

It's just going to sit in the landfill forever and ever and ever.

There'll be some corrosion, but it's pretty much going to sit there.

Whereas metals are so easy to recover and recycle and save so much money and energy and so forth.

In 2011, a private scrap metal company contracted with a nonprofit landfill in southern Maine to mine precious metals.

In 4 years, they recovered over 37,000 tons of metal worth $7.42 million.

In 2017, the city of Denton, Texas ended their landfill mining program before it could even start, after realizing that the benefits weren't worth its $4.56 million price tag.

According to experts, economics is usually the biggest challenge to make landfill mining work.

There's virtually no way I can see how that makes money.

The commodity values would have to be at such higher levels than they are today.

Whatever it is you're trying to get your hands on.

However, some experts claim that landfill mining can be profitable if done correctly.

That's because mining can often recover the most valuable asset of any privately owned landfill space.

Space gives you a lot of money when you start backfilling.

Many people are mining, but they're not reusing their space.

So they're saying, oh, OK, we cannot make money out of mining.

But if you do the operation right, you're never going to be involved.

Modern chemistry has also allowed landfills to be mined for energy.

When trash decays inside a landfill, it produces methane gas.

For decades, regulations have required landfills to suck out this highly flammable gas and dispose of it safely.

Landfill gas to energy projects, however, use the same gas to produce fuel and generate electricity for profit.

The landfill gas operations that are known as low or medium BTU, which are a predominant form of capture the gas, polish a little bit, turn it into electricity or steam and then sell it.

Those are good return on capital projects.

Energy Information Administration, landfill gas generates about 10.5 billion kilowatt hours of electricity every year.

That's enough to power roughly 810,000 homes and heat nearly 540,000 homes each year.

I just did a paper where I was looking at how much electricity you can generate from landfills compared to how much energy we're using to produce electricity.

I mean, it's a minor contributor to our heavy demands for energy in the US.

So you know, it's helpful that everything counts.

attracting the gas for other reasons, you might as well go ahead and do that if it makes sense from an economic standpoint to generate electricity.

Landfill gas to energy projects can cost over 5000000 dollars to build and operate.

While revenue from generating energy and fuel doesn't quite cover the cost, landfills do benefit greatly from generous subsidies.

Many cities went into that landfill gas to energy because they get the carbon credit and they get money from the federal government.

When they are producing the gas and capturing the gas, they're converting that into electricity.

The amount of gas you are capturing, you're reducing the greenhouse gas emission.

That's why government was subsidizing, not only for carbon credits, subsidizing because you're reducing the greenhouse gas emission pressure on the environment.

The tipping fee, combined with various mining techniques and government subsidies, have together transformed the landfill industry into a booming business.

Solid waste management will only continue to expand as long as there are those who view garbage as a resource rather than waste.

Because when it comes to landfills, 1 man's trash is quite literally another man's treasure.

Waste is not a waste, but it's a resource.

Because If you don't recycle the plastic, if we don't recycle the paper, if we don't recycle the paper, what are we going to do?

If we don't recycle the plastic, we are going to go after more bioproducts from gasoline.

If we don't reuse the electronic material, we are going to keep mining virgin material.

If we don't reuse and recycle this, we cannot talk about a circular economy.

That will always be a talk in the tabletop discussion.

Right next to a landfill in Northern California, just past a stack emitting methane from rotting garbage, there's an entirely different type of waste management facility that's burning trash instead of burying it.

That crane picks up about 7 tons of trash with each grab, and it's slowly fed into the chute for combustion.

The intense heat converts water in 21 miles of pipes around the combustor into steam that turns a turbine.

But unlike landfills, it doesn't emit any methane.

2000 degrees Fahrenheit, a very efficient burn, making 23 megawatts.

We only use about 3 megawatts to operate the whole facility.

Part of what's burned here is some 27,000 annual tons of waste from big companies like American Airlines, Quest Diagnostics, Sunny D and Subaru.

They're part of a growing movement by companies and governments to send less to landfills.

You can see there are some car seats and the like.

This actually comes from an automotive manufacturer that doesn't want to send these materials to a landfill.

Amazon and other retailers also use this combustion to dispose of returns they deem unfit to recycle, resell or donate.

It is our absolute last resort, both economically as well as environmentally.

We went to a facility run by Covanta, 1 of the biggest U.S.

Energy recovery companies, to see the process firsthand and find out why big companies like Amazon and parts of Europe and Asia have embraced burning their waste while most of the U.S.

With returns pouring in at record numbers, items like discarded clothes generate an estimated 5.8 billion pounds of landfill waste each year.

With an estimated return rate over 20 percent, Online purchases are more likely to be returned than those bought in store.

Yet Amazon says they send no items to landfills.

We wanted to find out how that was possible.

There are a number of items that we can't recover or are not recyclable.

And for reasons such as legal reasons or hygienic reasons or even product damage.

And in those cases, we do pursue energy recovery for those items.

While Covanta says it doesn't handle Amazon returns and Amazon wouldn't share who does, Covanta says about 10% of its business comes from corporate clients like Subaru, which likes to advertise it's building cars in 0 landfill plants.

For us, we want it to be 0 landfill because we want it to produce the car in a very environmentally friendly way.

What's in it for us is we want to do the right thing.

When a major car manufacturer like Subaru says there's 0 landfill, they have done the reduce, the reuse, the recycle, and what's left over They send to a facility like a waste energy facility.

It's the fastest growing part of the business because businesses are understanding sustainability and they're understanding that 1 of the major elements of sustainability is waste management.

It's a corporate marketing trick to say, ah, we're going to make energy from this.

And people don't realize what it means is we're actually burning it.

But climate experts say the carbon-intensive process provides a net reduction of greenhouse gases for 3 reasons.

It keeps waste out of landfills, which emit far more harmful methane.

700,000 tons of metal is recovered by the process each year, reducing the need for mining.

And it replaces energy that could otherwise be made by burning fossil fuels.

For every ton of garbage that you burn, you save a ton of CO2 that you would otherwise create from, say, burning a fossil fuel or something.

When you compare that to a landfill, every legitimate study shows that the environmental impact of a landfill is more than sending to a waste energy facility.

Landfills make up 17 percent of methane emissions and the global warming impact of methane is 86 times greater than carbon dioxide on a 20-year time frame.

But the bigger problem is, why do we have so much waste in the first place?

Is 1 of the most wasteful developed countries in the world, with some of the most trash generated per person per day.

Marco Costaldi of the City College of New York has been working in the combustion space for 20 years.

We produce about 4 pounds per person per day.

And to give you an idea of what that's like, that's, you know, your outfit that you're wearing today.

Instead of taking it off and putting the wash, you throw it away.

In Europe, in Japan, the amount of waste that's generated is about half that.

While it's indisputable that recycling and composting are far better, not all materials can go that route.

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The Business Of Trash | CNBC Marathon