How is that economically/environmentally sound to import garbage? Garbage should be burned locally to avoid extra pollution.
Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy
21–30 of 193 posts
Re: Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a naïve but genuine question.. is shipping trash from the UK to Norway and then setting it on fire better for the environment than burying it? (Or, at the very least, is it better to burn trash than to extract and burn something else?)
Oh they burn it? I though they were doing that bacteria to methane idea?
A number of WTE plants do a couple of things -- 1) biological / wet fraction goes to a digester for methane, which is either burned as additional fuel or sold to municipalities, 2) solid waste is burned, 3) ash from burning used for additional projects (road, train beds, etc).
Most also do cogeneration as well (energy + heat/steam distribution).
Re: Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy
#23Are there any negative externalities turning garbage into energy? What are the byproducts? Pollution released into the air? Spread to everyone else? Because this is wonderful!
Sounds like they do a pretty good job of controlling the emissions. My primary concern, and this is a fairly uneducated concern, but I always envisioned a (bleak) future where we had already mined all the precious and rare-earth metals and minerals and were forced to use our garbage dumps to re-claim those materials. Of course a good recycling program, would in theory, prevent this from ever being necessary, but in general, burning stuff to create energy feels sooo 20th century, we should really be using renewables and nuclear.
Re: Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy
#24How is that economically/environmentally sound to import garbage? Garbage should be burned locally to avoid extra pollution.
Not in my backyard!
Seriously, that's why it's shipped rather than burned locally. Some people don't want these plants around them no matter what the benefit.
Re: Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy
#25Are there any negative externalities turning garbage into energy? What are the byproducts? Pollution released into the air? Spread to everyone else? Because this is wonderful!
Sounds like they do a pretty good job of controlling the emissions. My primary concern, and this is a fairly uneducated concern, but I always envisioned a (bleak) future where we had already mined all the precious and rare-earth metals and minerals and were forced to use our garbage dumps to re-claim those materials. Of course a good recycling program, would in theory, prevent this from ever being necessary, but in g…
Well my primary concern was the garbage and pollution, such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. If we really found a way to cut our garbage down to 4%, that's pretty incredible ... of course if we start generating 25x more garbage to begin with then it will negate that.
Re: Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy
#26All our green buses here in the south of Sweden (Scania/Skåne) run on biological waste. There are big campaigns for getting more food and having people separate food and biological waste in their trash.
Re: Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy
#27For a different perspective I found this older article which ponders the economic impact of forcing 9 million people to spend time and energy sorting their trash: http://mises.org/daily/2855
Thank you!
I really think the fact that Sweden is 30 time smaller than the US is a significant aspect of the problem, which ought to be highlighted a bit more when doing a comparison between these two countries on their energy models.
How hard would it be for the US to implement such solution (assuming the cost would not be as prohibitive as it is compared with nuclear energy), first in a large city like NY (or LA) as a test bed? Maybe something like that already exist in the States?
Re: Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about the Swedish one but the Norwegian one in the other linked article says: Oslo, a recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn. So it seems so, yeah :-(
I live in a Swedish city, and I recently visited the local "garbage burning" power plant. It's not like the trash is just burned and the fumes released into the atmosphere, they pass through like 10-15 different types of filters removing and recycling different particles. The fumes that finally are released supposedly have a very negligible environmental impact. I'd link you some sources, but I got this information f…
Yes, emission from dioxin has been reduced by 99% since the 1980s beacuse of better filtering and much higher temperatures when burning the garbage.
From Naturvårdsverket (Swedish Environmental Protection Agency)
In Swedish http://www.naturvardsverket.se/Stod-i-miljoarbetet/Vaglednin...
Google translate http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=...
Re: Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy
#29How is that economically/environmentally sound to import garbage? Garbage should be burned locally to avoid extra pollution.
Probably better to ship it to a high quality incinerator than to burn it in a primitive one emitting lots of pollution.
Transport by sea requires negligible amount of energy. Local transport will likely waste more energy than the transport between two countries.
Re: Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy
#30For a different perspective I found this older article which ponders the economic impact of forcing 9 million people to spend time and energy sorting their trash: http://mises.org/daily/2855
Mr Bylund's article has some points, but I rather read scientific critisism than political.