Several visitors to the county incinerator Tuesday picked through ash-coated grey clumps of metal from about a day's worth of trash countians had sent to the burner.

Among the items: a man's handsome silver ring, a bronze medal from an Ephrata Relay race, snippets of copper plumbing pipe, aluminum beverage cans melted to the size of a bottle cap — and quarters all over the place.

The reason for the inspection was the startup of a $700,000 non-ferrous metal recovery system at the waste-to-energy incinerator in Conoy Township.

The value of bronze, copper, brass, aluminum and other metals has shot up so high that it no longer makes sense to let them be buried in the Frey Farm Landfill. That's where the ash left over from the incineration of the county's trash goes to be used as cover material.

All those quarters? Though they're barely fazed by 45 minutes inside a 2,000-degree inferno, they won't be picked out and put in a piggy bank. They're worth more melted down to zinc and silver.

The new system, which uses magnets to separate the metals from the ash on a conveyer belt, is expected to recover about 250 tons of non-ferrous metals a year.

Ferrous metals — mainly iron and steel items — have been recycled at the incinerator for years and generated about $700,000 for the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority last year.

Recovering the new slate of metals won't make the county's recycling rate, currently at 37 percent, jump.

But it might make you feel a little better about throwing out that old frying pan. And it helps make amends for all those people who don't recycle aluminum soda containers like they're supposed to.

"Now, if an aluminum beverage can gets into the waste stream, it melts into a nugget and we will recover it," says James Warner, executive director of the waste authority.

The recycling also will generate about $100,000 each for the waste authority, which owns the incinerator, and Covanta Lancaster, which operates it. The recovered metals will be sold to a metals broker.

The authority got Covanta to build the recovery system as a concession for extending Covanta's contract in 2006, three years before the contract expired.

This small boost to recycling efforts was made possible partly because of the soaring value of non-ferrous metals and partly due to advances in technology, notes Warner.

As incinerator ash is sped along on a conveyor belt traveling at 540 feet per second, magnets under the belt rotating at 2,600 revolutions per minute cause changing magnetic fields that actually propel the non-magnetic non-ferrous metals off the belt and down a chute.

Jim Klecko, Covanta's general manager at the incinerator, estimates about 30 percent of the company's 36 resource-recovery incinerators in the United States have built similar non-ferrous recovery systems, and most will eventually.

Klecko notes that only six years ago, some Covanta facilities actually had to pay to get rid of leftover non-ferrous metals. Now, they are heavy-metal cash cows.

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