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Turlock was ranked in the top 10 small cities category in Energy Production and Conservation (9) and Recycling (7) by the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Smarter Cities project.
The Turlock Irrigation District is one of only four publicly owned irrigation districts in the state of California that also provides electricity to residents. It was the first utility in the state to develop small hydropower plants in the 1970s, and has just installed California’s largest fuel cell to convert methane gas from the city’s Regional Water Quality Control facility into electricity.
The City of Turlock contracts with Turlock Scavenger, which has been recycling since the 1950s, to divert 62 percent of waste from the county’s Fink Road landfill. Since 1989, Stanislaus County has operated the Resource Recovery Center, a waste-to-energy plant, with the nearby City of Modesto. Much of the Fink Road waste is diverted there and turned into fuel, providing enough energy to power 18,000 homes.