Energy-from-waste facilities are highly efficient power plants that produce heat and electricity by utilizing municipal solid waste as their fuel, thereby replacing the energy produced by conventional power plants that use fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, or natural gas.

It is important to note that Energy to Waste plants should come into play after you have been through the full range of "reduce, re-use, recycle" options available. They are for what is left after best recycling efforts have been completed.

Far better than expending energy to explore, recover, process, and transport the fuel from a distant source, EFW plants find value in what others consider garbage.

In Europe, approximately 60 million tonnes of municipal solid waste (MSW), or 24% of all MSW, is thermally treated each year in approximately 400 plants. According to the Confederation of European Waste-To-Energy Plants (CEWEP), these facilities generate about 23.4 million MWh of electricity, enough to supply the populations of Portugal, Estonia, and Denmark. They also produce about 58.5 million MWh of heat, or the entire populations of Belgium, Hungary, Bulgaria and Norway.

MSW thereby replaces between six and thirty-two million tonnes of fossil fuels (gas, oil, hard coal, and liginitel), reducing CO2 emissions by 16-32 million tonnes. In substituting MSW for fossil fuels, Europeans are supplying about 7 million households with electricity and 13.4 million households with heat.

In Amsterdam, one EFW plant processes approximately 1.5 million tonnes of municipal solid waste per year, generating enough energy to power all the city’s trams and metro vehicles, as well as its street lighting, civic centre, opera house, and 70,000 city homes, while also reducing CO2 emissions by 346,000 tonnes.

In the US, 87 plants operate in 29 states, utilizing about 8% of the country’s municipal solid waste and generating approximately 2,700 megawatts of clean electricity. Moreover, unlike other types of renewable resources, energy-from-waste is considered base load power that operates 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

As a result, US facilities reliably generate approximately 17 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year - enough to power 2.3 million homes. This accounts for nearly 20% of all renewable electricity generation in the United States.