# Waste to energy > Steam and current from the refuse that is left - Date: c. 1876 - Era: Electric age - Domain: [Energy & Prime Movers](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/energy/) - Rebuild stage: V (Electric age) - Difficulty: 5/5 - URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/waste-to-energy/ A waste-to-energy plant burns the household waste that is not recycled and turns its heat into electricity and, often, heat for buildings. Its flue gas must be cleaned, and its ash still holds metals worth recovering. In 1876 Manchester was already using the heat of its refuse furnaces, and in 1893 Halifax first made electricity from town refuse. ![Waste to energy · Steam and current from the refuse that is left](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.Fv5-O21F_17ECLp.webp) ## Legend 1. Tipping hall, with a refuse lorry at the door 2. Boiler house 3. Flue-gas cleaning building 4. Chimney 5. Turbine and generator hall 6. Bottom ash in an open loading bay ## What it is A waste-to-energy plant is a power station whose fuel is the household and commercial waste left after recycling. It burns the waste in a furnace built for that purpose and, like other thermal power stations, turns the heat into electricity with a [turbine](/en/inventions/steam-turbine/) and a [generator](/en/inventions/generator/); many plants also pipe heat to homes, offices or factories. Burning reduces the waste to a much smaller volume of ash, and the energy replaces some of the coal or gas that would otherwise be burned. Waste policy treats this as a fallback. The US Environmental Protection Agency ranks energy recovery below cutting waste and below reuse and recycling, and above landfill. The UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) says the same and adds that a plant is worth more the more of the energy it puts to use: a plant that also sells its heat makes far better use of the energy in the waste than one that only makes electricity. ## How it works ![A modern waste-to-energy plant seen from outside, a long windowless hall with a curved metal roof and a single tall slender chimney, with a refuse lorry on the access road in front](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.DjbQAMK5_38JkI.webp) _Seen from outside, a modern plant is a large closed hall under a tall chimney._ A plant takes in the mixed waste that is left once households and businesses have set aside what can be recycled. What comes out is electricity for the grid, heat that in many towns warms water piped to buildings nearby, cleaned flue gas, and ash. The waste is handled inside closed buildings so that dust and smells do not escape into the street. The gas leaving the boiler still carries fine dust and pollutants from everything that was in the waste. Laws on emissions set what it may contain when it leaves the chimney, and every plant has a gas-cleaning section with filters and is licensed and monitored against those limits. ![A heap of grey incinerator bottom ash, a coarse mix of porous clinker, stones and glass fragments, with a few rusty steel scraps, nails and crumpled bits of aluminium picked out beside it](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.DtWoKHyB_2iIVra.webp) _Bottom ash is a gravelly clinker that still holds pieces of metal from the waste._ What is left after burning is bottom ash, a clinker of stones, glass, ceramics and metal. The metals in it are recovered and sold for recycling. In Europe the rest may go into roads and building work only if it meets environmental and technical criteria, and Zero Waste Europe has reported that these rules differ from country to country and are often weak. In the United States, the EPA says, the ash goes to landfills built to protect the groundwater. None of this is a task for a home or a garden: burning waste in a stove or an open fire releases smoke and pollutants without any of the controls of a plant. ## History and evolution Towns in Britain began to burn their refuse in furnaces in the second half of the nineteenth century, to be rid of it. Alfred Fryer, of the Nottingham engineers Manlove, Alliott and Co., built his refuse destructor at Manchester in 1876, according to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica and to a review in Nature of W. Francis Goodrich's book on refuse disposal and power production. Shigeru Mizoiri and Kohei Watanabe, who studied Fryer's patents, write that it stood at the Water Street depot and that his patent of that year puts the heat of the furnace to use. A magazine report of a visit to the works of Manchester's Health Committee in 1876, reprinted by the engineer Percy Boulnois in 1881, describes destructors that burned rubbish long heaped in the suburbs and whose heat was put to use in the yard, and a newspaper account of 1882 says that refuse fired the boilers of the city's Holt Town works. Engineers then tried to turn the heat into light. In 1893 the refuse destructor at Halifax became the first plant in Britain to make electricity from refuse, enough to light a searchlight and a set of arc lamps. The historian of engineering D. G. Tucker also describes early stations at Cheltenham and Oldham. ![A Victorian brick building with arched windows and a tall square brick chimney, a horse-drawn refuse cart at its gate and a street lamp in front](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.B2c-6c1c_1JS0Pg.webp) _In the 1890s some town councils built refuse destructors and electricity stations in one building._ In June 1897 the vestry of Shoreditch, in London, opened the first successful station designed from the start to burn refuse and generate electricity, inaugurated by Lord Kelvin. Its motto, carved on the building, was E pulvere lux et vis, "out of the dust, light and power". In New York, a [sorting plant](/en/inventions/waste-sorting/) tried under George Waring drew its own power from the refuse it could not sell. The early stations also sold their clinker for road building and used exhaust steam to heat public baths. The 1911 Britannica warned that refuse was not a fuel on which engineers could count to light a town, because the demand for current rose and fell. In the United States many city incinerators closed when federal clean-air rules required equipment they did not have, the EPA notes, and most of the plants that now recover energy from waste are in the Northeast. ## Key facts - Heat of refuse furnaces put to use, Manchester: 1876 - First electricity from town refuse in Britain: Halifax, 1893 - First successful station built from the start to burn refuse and make electricity: Shoreditch, London, June 1897 - Place in waste policy (EPA, Defra): Below reuse and recycling, above landfill ## Requires - [Steam Engine](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/steam-engine/): Heat turned into motion (1712) - [Electric Generator](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/generator/): Motion turned into current (1831) ## Sources - [H. Percy Boulnois, Dirty Dustbins and Sloppy Streets (London, 1881), chapter VI, pp. 39–44, quoting The British Architect of 1876 on the Manchester Health Committee works](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54454/54454-h/54454-h.htm), Project Gutenberg - [Shigeru Mizoiri and Kohei Watanabe, What is written in the world's first refuse incinerator patent? (23rd annual conference of the Japan Society of Material Cycles and Waste Management, 2012), table 1 and section 4](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsmcwm/23/0/23_157/_pdf/-char/en), J-STAGE, Japan Society of Material Cycles and Waste Management - [Holt Town Sanitary Works (Berwickshire News and General Advertiser, 11 July 1882)](https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Holt_Town_Sanitary_Works), Grace's Guide to British Industrial History - [Halifax Power Station](https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Halifax_Power_Station), Grace's Guide to British Industrial History - [D. G. Tucker, Electricity from town refuse: three quarters of a century ago, Electronics and Power 22(1), 1976, pp. 16–20](https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/biblio/7266047), OSTI, US Department of Energy (abstract) - [Alfred Fryer](https://gracesguide.co.uk/Alfred_Fryer), Grace's Guide to British Industrial History - [Destructors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911)](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Destructors), Wikisource - [Review of W. Francis Goodrich, Refuse Disposal and Power Production (Constable, 1904), Nature 70, no. 1802, 12 May 1904](https://www.dbc.wroc.pl/Content/21815/PDF/023908.pdf), Nature, via Dolnośląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa - [Refuse destructors (site of), Water Street, Manchester](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/heritage-gateway/results/record/40b1668f-44ca-471f-970f-e86d7ea4f9ac/MGM21390), Historic England, Heritage Gateway - [Shoreditch Electricity Station](https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/shoreditch-electricity-station), London Remembers - [Shoreditch Refuse Destructor and Generator Station (supplement to GLIAS Newsletter 106, October 1986)](http://www.glias.org.uk/glias/shoreditch-refuse-destructor.html), Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society - [D. Gordon Tucker, The generation of electricity from refuse: an historical introduction (paper for an IEE meeting on the history of electrical engineering), p. 1](https://outsideecho.com/DGT-BIO_files/PDFs/DGT32.pdf), D. G. Tucker papers, outsideecho.com - [George E. Waring Jr., Report of the Department of Street Cleaning of the City of New York for 1895-96-97 (1898)](https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ya8sm56s), Wellcome Collection - [Energy recovery from the combustion of municipal solid waste (MSW)](https://www.epa.gov/smm/energy-recovery-combustion-municipal-solid-waste-msw), US Environmental Protection Agency - [Energy from waste: a guide to the debate (2014)](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c77ade5274a559005a113/pb14130-energy-waste-201402.pdf), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) - [A. N. Rollinson, A toxic legacy: bottom ash in Europe's circular economy, executive summary (May 2026)](https://zerowasteeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ZWE_May26_IBA-report_exec-summary.pdf), Zero Waste Europe Fact-checked on 2026-10-21. --- The Last Codex · https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/waste-to-energy/ · © The Last Codex. Texts, plates and figures: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.