Steam billows from a tall stack near the power block facility at the MIRA trash-to-energy facility in Hartford’s South Meadows. (Cloe Poisson, CTMirror.org)
The Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority plant is a hulking presence on the Connecticut River along Hartford’s southeast flank – a sprawling complex of buildings and emissions stacks that was constructed for another time and use.
It shows.
In the winding corridors and rooms of this fortress-like structure — which originally burned coal to make electricity and now burns trash to generate a small portion of the state’s power — ceiling tiles are stained and warped after years of absorbing explosions from objects like gas canisters that mistakenly wind up in the waste stream. It’s noisy and it smells, though given the nearly 3,000 tons of trash cycled daily through cavernous holding areas across what seems like miles of conveyors and into the incinerator next door, logic says it ought to smell worse.