Is incineration really the more environmentally friendly way to go? How does this compare to something like coal in terms of environmental impact? I'm imagining giant trash furnaces spewing ash and smoke into the sky but I'm guessing that they're using something more sophisticated.
The idea behind incineration is that you have a piece of something that is capable of burning and burning it at a high enough temperature breaks all the molecules inside down into smaller pieces. Or, to put it slightly differently, if you have ever smelled burnt plastic, it smells really bad. If you burn plastic at a high enough temperature, it no longer smells bad. High temperature makes molecules break apart into s…
- it's environmentally open-loop. Life on earth is fundamentally closed-loop. Energy extraction is a one-way street. (I find entropy depressing.)
- it discourages the 3 waste r's (reduction, re-use, and recycling).
- the net energy recovery is always a small fraction of the energy that went into making the stuff, and less than the savings of the alternate 3-r's.
- organic materials should be aerobically composted, which prevents methane generation and truly closes the biological loop, or at the very least put through anaerobic digestion to recover some hydrocarbon fuel prior to composting whatever remains.