BOSTON -- One person's trash is another person's electricity? That's the idea behind a local company's push to turn household waste into energy.

NewsCenter 5's David Brown reported Tuesday that they are downsizing landfills and reducing methane gas in the atmosphere at the same time.

At the Covanta Energy From Waste facility, 200 trash trucks unload tons of garbage every day. All the rubbish that is picked up curbside in Boston ends up at the facility. The huge piles of trash will soon be burned becoming valuable electricity for New England.

"When you send your trash to an energy-from-waste facility, we combust the waste making electricity 520 kilowatts of electricity per ton, whereas a landfill it is just waste," said Ken Nydam of Covanta.

The piles are turned by front-end loaders, putting in extra air to allow the trash to burn quickly, hot and clean. A huge grapple picks up 3 tons in each scoop.

Meanwhile, a magnet pulls out metals that are recycled. Every six minutes, the trash is gravity fed into a furnace. The fire is monitored in a control room. It needs to burn evenly and thoroughly at 2,000 degrees.

"With trash you need the proper amount of air. The proper amount of mixing and he kind of fine tunes that and gives it a little more depending on the trash," said Chief Engineer Joe Becker.

While the trash is burning, water is boiling.

"The boiler room takes the steam from the boilers and brings it to the turbine, which makes electricity which we put on the grid," Nydam said.

The steam rushes through pipes, leading it to the turbine that continuously spins, generating electricity. For every ton of waste burned one ton of trash is kept out of landfills, and the energy created cuts dependence on foreign fuel.