It seems a bit odd to see Albany’s skyline without the ANSWERS smoke-stack

It seems a bit odd to see Albany’s skyline without the ANSWERS smoke-stack … 🏭

Forty years the dirty old and trash burning plants smoke stack remained a fixture of the skyline, a tailpipe of a crude mass-burn garbage machine and later oil-burning factory. It might have been an improvement over the previous heavy-oil burning plant, but hardly was a clean air plant, with emissions equipment limited to the electrostatic precipator and a “high burn temperature” of the millions of tons of heavy, residual fuel oil and shredded garbage. It had minimal pollution equipment that was hardly designed to screen out lead (from solder from burned television sets and scraps of painted wood), polyvinyl chloride packaging and discarded appliances, sulfur-rich industrial wastes and furniture or a dozen other things that you probably shouldn’t burn in mass quantities downtown with minimal pollution controls. You can definitely raise a toast to the end of this terrible dirty era in Capital Region’s history, even if the plant hadn’t burned garbage in 30 years, and hadn’t burned oil in 15 years.

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