RACINE, Wis. — At Batten International Airport, some trash means cash.

Batten, 3239 N. Green Bay Road, has been incinerating food waste from international flights on site for about six to eight years. It also collects and incinerates trash for Milwaukee's General Mitchell International Airport and the Kenosha and Waukegan, Ill., airports.

By performing that service, Batten Airport Manager David Mann said, "We're not breaking the bank, but it puts some change in the bank."

If a flight lands at Batten, the airport charges $125 to burn a small bag and $250 for a larger plane. There's an additional $25 charge to pick up another airport's garbage.

Mann did not have figures available about the amount of trash burned or revenue created. But he said the $16,000 incinerator paid for itself the first year.

"We just really wanted to provide a service to our customers, but it turned out to be a little bigger and more profitable than we originally anticipated," he said.

By federal law, he explained, incoming onboard trash from any country except Canada must be carefully bagged, sealed and incinerated. That's the U.S. government's way of guarding against invaders such as cholera, anthrax and mad cow disease sneaking into this country.

"Anything that food has touched" is forbidden and must be reduced to white ash, Mann said.

And that means everything. One corporation returned from Europe with five or six perfectly good, untouched cheesecakes and tried to give them to the airport staff, he said. They had to say sorry and feed them to the incinerator instead.

Typical flight trash includes plastic or paper plates, cups, silverware and various kinds of food containers, as well as used beverage cans and bottles. "That's why they use plastic silverware," Mann said. "It burns."

That may conjure up images of filthy, foul-smelling smoke and unhealthy chemical emissions. But Mann said three U.S. agencies have approved the process, and the incinerator burns too hot to pollute.

The natural-gas-fueled device, made by Southern Breeze Fabricators, burns at up to 1,500 degrees, Mann said. It has two 600,000-Btu burners, the lower one to incinerate the trash, plastic bag and all. "The other one, on the top, all it does is burn the smoke."

The incinerator is well below the size at which additional approvals and monitoring would be required, Mann said.

In the past, Batten paid a waste hauler to truck trash from international flights to Indianapolis for incineration.

Then the airport bought a smaller incinerator for its own waste. Named the Smartash, it burned leftover jet fuel.

Then Batten started getting outside requests for its use, Mann said. Each airport added required its own approval process.

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Batten has also incinerated international garbage from two ships that docked at the port of Milwaukee, Mann said.

Occasionally the airport also incinerates confiscated illegal drugs for the Racine Police Department and other local agencies. "We don't charge for it," Mann said.

Batten is not about to go into the incineration business big time, he said. "We're as big as we're going to get."

Information from: The Journal Times, http://www.journaltimes.com

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