An iconic American company whose trash trucks are part of the landscape is increasingly also a major player in the energy space, currently producing enough electricity to power one million homes and aiming to double that number in the next decade.

Waste Management has been filling landfills and feeding recycling facilities with the famously prodigious output of American trash cans for years, but it has also become a leading developer, operator and owner of waste-to-energy and landfill gas-to-energy facilities in the US.

The company’s most recent project, a 3.2 MW landfill gas-to-energy facility, at the Eagle Valley Recycling and Disposal Facility in Orion, Michigan, completed construction on September 22 and is now fully operational, the firm said. The Eagle Valley facility is owned by Waste Management of Michigan.

Roughly 1,200 cubic feet per minute of landfill gas is collected and channeled into two 20 cylinder Caterpillar engines, creating electricity fed into DTE Energy’s grid. The power is sold to a General Motors assembly plant in Orion. Waste Management is also providing “clean” power from its landfills to nearby companies like a Ford Motor stamping plant and a West Michigan soybean drying business.

“As Michigan and the rest of the nation look to invest in renewable energy, landfill gas is becoming more attractive because it is reliable,” Senior District Manager of the Eagle Valley Facility Chuck Cassie said in announcing the new plant.

The intermittent nature of many renewables has left power plant developers in less sunny or windy regions looking to biomass and waste energy as a way to access renewable power while they wait for new transmission lines to be built that can carry the renewable electricity over long distances at a reasonable cost.