First, let’s get into a little history... The Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County is a governmental agency that was formed by the Florida Legislature in 1975 to address the many open dump sites throughout the county. We are a dependent special district, and get most of our budget from a non-ad valorem assessment on your tax bill. The mission of the SWA is to manage the materials discarded by the residents and businesses of Palm Beach County in a manner consistent with our legislative mandate and applicable local, state and federal ordinances, regulations and laws.
To do this, the SWA has built an award-winning integrated system of facilities to effectively manage the county’s waste. The SWA’s system includes seven home chemical and recycling centers that safely recycle or dispose of more than 4.2 million pounds of home chemicals; six transfer stations that handle 75 percent of the county’s waste; two waste-to-energy facilities that combust 1.8 million tons of post recycled municipal solid waste per year to create electricity; a recovered materials processing facility that processes more than 90,000 tons of blue and yellow bin recyclables each year; a biosolids processing facility that turns about 150,000 tons of poop from the rich and famous into an environmentally-friendly fertilizer amendment; and a landfill that is our last resort for waste disposal.
