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A Brief History of Waste Management 41
Another innovative thermal disposal method at the turn of the century involved the technology
of “reduction.” This essentially entailed “cooking” the garbage to extract a wide range of mar-
ketable by-products, including grease and “tankage,” i.e., dried animal solids which could be sold
as fertilizers (Blumberg and Gottlieb, 1989).
Beyond simple mass-burn incineration as a waste reduction system, the British and Germans
developed technologies to recover energy from incineration (Figure 2.17). The first plant to gener-
ate electricity from incineration was developed in Great Britain in the mid-1890s. By 1912, 76
plants in Great Britain produced energy as did 17 more in the rest of Europe. A pilot project was
built in New York City in 1905. Interest in using incinerators to convert waste into energy, however,
was low in an era of cheap energy alternatives. During this period only two cities in North America
— Westmount, Quebec, and Milwaukee — derived any revenue from steam produced by incinera-
tors (Marshall, 1929; Melosi, 2000). The “waste-to-energy” technology failed to become estab-
lished in the United States for another 60 years (Blumberg and Gottlieb, 1989).
Up through the 1960s, in many large U.S. cities, household wastes were incinerated in apartment
units in order to reduce waste volumes. These incinerators, unfortunately, burned unsorted wastes,
operated at relatively low temperatures, and lacked air pollution control. As a result, metals, soot, and

FIGURE 2.17 Early waste-to-energy plant. U.S. Patent Office, Washington, DC.