When FirstEnergy's Bruce Mansfield power plant in Shippingport, Pennsylvania was built in 1976, it was the first utility plant built with an original scrubber system to remove sulfur dioxide from emissions. But this "wet" scrubber system produces a lime-based byproduct, technically called calcium sulfite. For years, FirstEnergy simply land filled it.

But nearly two years ago, FirstEnergy opened a $30 million recycling facility at the Bruce Mansfield plant. It transforms the scrubber byproduct into a commercial grade gypsum. The National Gypsum Company built an $85-million drywall facility across the street from the Mansfield plant specifically to take advantage of this. A conveyor belt transports the gypsum from the utility to the drywall facility. With it, National Gypsum is able to produce enough drywall for 70,000 homes.

"The project has now completed its first year of full commercial operation and produced 450,000 tons of gypsum from waste stream from the Bruce Mansfield plant's environmental scrubber system," says FirstEnergy spokesperson Ellen Raines. "We hope that in the coming year we continue that level of production, so that we can reach about 500,000 tons of gypsum a year."

The recycling process is called Forced Oxidation Gypsum, and the FirstEnergy system is the only one like it in the world.

"There are other plants across the country that use a similar scrubber, but what makes this project unique is that at the same time the technology was developed that would turn scrubber byproduct into gypsum, the wallboard industry was expanding its facilities," Raines says.

Both the environmental and economic benefits are huge, Raines says.

"Not only do we avoid the cost of land filling a byproduct of the scrubber system, we also avoid having to develop new places to put the product," she points out. "And National Gypsum saw this as an opportunity to build a plant near a readily available source of inexpensive material."