Can We Generate Renewable Energy by Burning Trash? (cnbc.com) 86
CNBC visited a company that burns trash from a California landfill, and then "harnesses steam to make enough electricity to power 18,000 homes in the area" — which turns out to be part of a surprisingly large industry:
A portion of the waste comes from companies including American Airlines, Quest Diagnostics, Sunny Delight and Subaru.... Major retailers like Amazon also use this combustion method to dispose of returns they deem unfit to recycle, resell, or donate....
The U.S. is one of the most wasteful developed countries in the world. Of the record 292 million tons of waste generated by Americans each year, more than half is landfilled, about a third is recycled, and 12% is incinerated at waste-to-energy facilities, according to the World Bank. Online commerce poses a particular problem. Not only are internet purchases breaking records in terms of volume, but roughly 20% of items get returned, which is a higher number than for in-store purchases. Returns solutions provider Optoro says U.S. returns generate an estimated 5.8 billion pounds of landfill waste each year.
But the article also points out that more than half of U.S. states define waste-to-energy as a renewable energy source." Unlike landfills, many governments and non-governmental organizations consider it a source of greenhouse gas mitigation. That includes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where Susan Thorneloe leads research on materials management.
U.S. climate experts say these are the three reasons the burning process produces a net reduction of greenhouse gasses. First, it keeps waste out of landfills, which emit methane that the EPA estimates is 86 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Second, waste-to-energy facilities reduce the need for mining because they recover 700,000 tons of metal each year. And finally, they produce energy, reducing the need to burn fossil fuels.... The steam can also be captured and piped up to a mile away to heat or cool entire buildings, like Target Field in Minneapolis....
The EPA estimates that for every megawatt-hour of electricity generated, waste-to-energy emits an average of just over half a metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent gasses. Landfills emit six times that, and coal plants emit nearly double.
At least some scientists CNBC spoke to said that air pollution technology has advanced so much in the last two decades that most common toxins have largely been eliminated.
The U.S. is one of the most wasteful developed countries in the world. Of the record 292 million tons of waste generated by Americans each year, more than half is landfilled, about a third is recycled, and 12% is incinerated at waste-to-energy facilities, according to the World Bank. Online commerce poses a particular problem. Not only are internet purchases breaking records in terms of volume, but roughly 20% of items get returned, which is a higher number than for in-store purchases. Returns solutions provider Optoro says U.S. returns generate an estimated 5.8 billion pounds of landfill waste each year.
But the article also points out that more than half of U.S. states define waste-to-energy as a renewable energy source." Unlike landfills, many governments and non-governmental organizations consider it a source of greenhouse gas mitigation. That includes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where Susan Thorneloe leads research on materials management.
U.S. climate experts say these are the three reasons the burning process produces a net reduction of greenhouse gasses. First, it keeps waste out of landfills, which emit methane that the EPA estimates is 86 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Second, waste-to-energy facilities reduce the need for mining because they recover 700,000 tons of metal each year. And finally, they produce energy, reducing the need to burn fossil fuels.... The steam can also be captured and piped up to a mile away to heat or cool entire buildings, like Target Field in Minneapolis....
The EPA estimates that for every megawatt-hour of electricity generated, waste-to-energy emits an average of just over half a metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent gasses. Landfills emit six times that, and coal plants emit nearly double.
At least some scientists CNBC spoke to said that air pollution technology has advanced so much in the last two decades that most common toxins have largely been eliminated.
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Probably "which turns out to be part of a surprisingly large industry" in the first line of TFS.
Must consider production costs and inputs (Score:2)
You've been suckered by a cunting [sic] troll. You propagated the troll's vacuous Subject, too.
The story is pretty idiotic. The key word is "production" as in "production cost" or "energy that produced the original garbage". Searching on that angle there are a couple of thoughtful contributions to the discussion, but you were FP trolled on that one.
The REAL problem is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] in a bid for informative mod? But there is already a reference to
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Right. Burning trash puts the carbon into the air, practically the same as burning coal. Burying trash sequesters it. Simple formula.
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Landfill methane emissions are from decomposing food waste, which generally doesn't burn well. I don't suggest coal as an alternative to burning trash. Coal is terrible for emissions. I'm saying that burning trash is as bad as coal.
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It depends on the trash. If you burn wood, paper, food waste, and plastics derived from plants (such as PLA), it's carbon neutral. OTOH, if you burn plastics derived from fossil fuels, you're just burning fossil fuels at arm's length.
If you use some of the heat from burning actually renewable materials to de-polymerize plastics derived from fossil fuels into new raw material, you're recycling.
If you pyrolyse the waste, burn the evolved gases and bury the remaining solid, you're sequestering.
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Burning wood and burning coal take the same carbon toll. Not at all neutral. If you want to take carbon out of the air your bury wood in the ground and start it on its way to becoming coal.
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Burying the wood would be carbon negative. Burning it is carbon neutral as long as you grow a tree to make it's replacement. Corbon comes out from burning, gets absorbed by the new tree.
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It's a way to do something useful with the things we cannot (yet) recycle. There's a big trash burning power plant nearby here. It also provides heating and hot water to households using the excess heat they generate, including our house. Rather efficient. But renewable energy? No. Unless everything they burn comes from a renewable source..
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Untrue.
Most carbon-containing trash will decompose in the landfill and give off methane.
Capturing that methane and burning it for energy will probably release less greenhouse gases than burning the trash directly, But theoretically, at least, they can burn the trash cleanly, though some trash-burning facilities I know of around Chicago have been closed down for polluting more than they claimed
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Methane comes from decomposing animal waste. Decomposing wood just produces carbon dioxide. And it doesn't even do that when it's buried six feet or more under.
wondering ... (Score:2)
... what happens with the toxic gases from the combustion of plastics, paint, etc? those just thrown into the atmosphere? doesn't sound like a good idea!
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Indeed the answer to the headline question is obviously yes, the correct question is what are the global warming and pollution effects of landfill vs incineration. According to the summary incineration is better... I feel like there's something missing from the picture here.
Long term, there should be no waste, only materials to be recycled, anything else is literally and logically unsustainable.
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Long term, there should be no waste, only materials to be recycled, anything else is literally and logically unsustainable.
Figure out how to recycle plastic or develop a small, economical anti-gravity device and you'll never have to work another day in your life.
Re:wondering ... (Score:5, Informative)
If you burn it hot enough to burn completely, toxic gasses aren't really a problem. A bonfire won't remotely do the job, instead creating all sorts of toxic partially-burned and cross-linked organic molecules. But a properly operated furnace designed specifically for the job can burn them cleanly.
Plastics are hydrocarbons - burn them completely and all you get out is water and CO2.
Paint is mostly the same thing - e.g. latex paint is a blend of styrene, methyl styrene, and vinyl - all plastics.
Now, both have additives (pigments, property modifiers) that may be a bigger issue - but those are only a tiny fraction of the whole, and many/most of them (BPA, etc) are hydrocarbons themselves, so aren't a problem. And most of the rest are chosen to be non-toxic, and typically remain so when fully burned.
Of course plastics are typically made from fossil fuels, so burning them is still just as much of a problem for global warming as burning any other fossil fuel. But so long as they're burned completely, toxic waste isn't much of an issue.
Re:wondering ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Roughly speaking about 97% of the oil coming out the ground is brunt for fuel. The remaining 3% generate about 97% of the value society derives from oil. That is a barrel of plastic is for more valuable than a barrel of diesel.
Now those numbers are likely out of date as they are from a poster on a science lab wall when I was at school over quarter of a century ago. However they are likely to be broadly the same today.
Consequently if we where only burning the oil extracted from the ground after it had been used for something else that would represent ~95% reduction in fossil fuel usage. So while not carbon neutral one suspects global warming would not be so much of an issue if at all if there was a 95% reduction in CO2 emissions.
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> But a properly operated furnace designed specifically for the job can burn them cleanly.
That's not easy to do. And expensive.
From the article "Clean air technology cuts emissions to near-zero" https://www.huffpost.com/entry... [huffpost.com]
Near-zero? When I follow the two links under that heading I get two 404s.
This is the kind of tech they're talking about:
"The Minneapolis WTE facility, for example, uses the following process to control their emissions: "
> Air is injected into the boiler to control nitrogen oxi
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A fair point, and a compelling reason to find less toxic alternatives if burning becomes the preferred way to dispose of plastics. Or alternately, to continue improving the flue-gas scrubbing (and reclamation?) technologies.
There shouldn't be any dioxins though - those are all hydrocarbons (slightly pre-oxidized)
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If burned hot enough the dioxins don't form.
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Depends, are you using the chemical or common name?
In common usage vinyl refers to specifically to PVC - but to a chemist PVC is just one member of a large group of vinyls, which are defined by a particular hydrocarbon polymer form that may include functional substitutions with other atoms (like chlorine).
But yeah, I forgot about PVC when making that claim.
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It's called a scrubber.
Here is some info on a sort of local one.
https://my.spokanecity.org/sol... [spokanecity.org]
It's the second best way to get rid of plastic. The best way would be pyrolysis to break the plastic down, then regrow the molecules back into new plastic. But this is amazingly energy intensive.
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It depends on how you burn it. If you burn it hot enough, it all breaks down into mostly CO2 and water with a trace of 'ash' consisting of metals and other potentially useful substances.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (Score:2)
I'm reminded of the old order for recycling - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
Reduce is obvious - use less. Reuse is like cars, keep driving your slightly older car, because of the big resource cost of replacing it, even if new cars are somewhat better. Recycle is the last option, before just throwing it away.
Personally, I'd treat it like tomato paste in school lunches counting as a vegetable*, while it may not meet SOME definitions, in practicality, it does. It's a self regenerating source of gas/power, at leas
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I read or watched a piece a few weeks ago that calculated buying an EV would be a net positive after two or three years, including production cost.
I have no idea how accurate their numbers were but there you go. That, by the way, is basically what annoys me most these days. It should be possible to do the math on such things and come up with a clear winner as far as strategies go.
If only one could trust "scientists" these days, it shouldn't be too hard. But the effort required to keep everyone else's noses
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By my math an EV is a loss for over seven years compared to my buying a Honda two years old for $16K, it's seven years old now and doing fine. Gasoline just isn't that expensive, even now
Re:Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (Score:4, Insightful)
More or less the same here. If I were in the market for a car, I'd consider an EV. But since I'm not, and not likely to be for some years...
Well, guess I'll be using a gas-burner for quite a few years yet. And maybe they'll work out a way to lower up-front cost of EV's. Because you won't be convincing people who are struggling to pay the bills to buy EV....
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I read or watched a piece a few weeks ago that calculated buying an EV would be a net positive after two or three years, including production cost.
Since cars require fuel for them to work at all, how can you ever get to a net positive?
And by driving you do not magically reproduce the materials the car is made out of.
I think if you look closely at any car you will find that they stay negative their entire existence, EV or not.
What you could potentially argue for is that EVs have a smaller net negative effect compared to renewables.
Re:Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (Score:5, Informative)
It's worth mentioning that reuse covers more than just keeping your old [car] - it also includes the entire second-hand market. So long as *somebody* is using your old [phone] rather than buying a new one, its service-life is extended and new products aren't being made.
That's why right-to-repair and modular designs based on standardized components are so important to sustainability. They let you easily replace broken/obsolete components and continue using the rest (or in the worst case, scavenge whatever's still good to fix other devices).
When products are built to last you can get away with only producing (near) top of the line products, which can still be replaced frequently, while the old models make their way down through the second-hand market. In most situations everyone wins that way, since a durable, high-quality, 4th-hand product will generally be vastly superior to whatever cheap new trash you could get for a similar price.
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It's a self regenerating source of gas/power, at least until we change our habits substantially.
That's pertinent nonsense.
Nothing is regenerated in this process.
You get an extra use out of materials by burning it but after burning you have destroyed the materials and you can't reuse them anymore.
It is not a cyclic process, it is a one-way street.
There is no notion of 'self regeneration' in this approach.
Also, if your pizza is full of fat, overly processed wheat and dubious meat byproducts then that little bit of overcooked fruitsauce won't help anything except greenwashing the school.
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That's pertinent nonsense.
You're right that it's pertinent. But it isn't nonsense.
Yes, you get extra use out of the materials - use that you would not otherwise enjoy. Ergo, it's still increasing efficiency.
Burning wood, for example, doesn't by itself regenerate the wood. But the wood is a constantly regenerating supply via tree farms and such.
Like I said, until we change our habits, it's renewable, as more trash just keeps being generated.
And the pizzas I'm talking about, well, if that is what you think they were, it is no wonde
plasma arc disposal (Score:2)
I think this can be a net generator, via the production of syngas.
https://www.explainthatstuff.c... [explainthatstuff.com]
either way it seems like a much better idea than burning.
Not really (Score:2)
Some of the trash is made out of non-renewable resources, so trash to energy can't be fully renewable by definition. If that weren't true, sure. But you can't address that problem from the trash burning end, so the answer is no.
If we decide that we have to keep using this much plastic, then there are ways which at least don't lose money to recycle it. There's at least one process for recycling all plastics involving cooking them in a closed reactor, and capturing the cases and liquids released in the proces
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You're right but missing the point. The question is not what trash is made of. Trash is trash. That is the raw ingredient we are talking about. What it was made of was made for a different use in mind. Unless we eliminate the industry that generated the trash is keeps on being generated, hence a renewable resource since it is being generated in real time.
But admittedly in 1000 years when the world is either dead or living in a garbage free utopia then the definition will no longer apply.
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the trash is keeps on being generated, hence a renewable resource
It's not renewable because the generation of the trash uses up incredible amounts of resources.
Renewable resources are things like the sun, wind or the tides. Basically natural phenomena that are so big we can extract energy from them without consequences.
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we should reduce, reuse, and recycle plastics when possible. But burying them in a landfill is the next best thing.
All plastics offgas, all plastics leach under some conditions, all common plastics leach toxins into water under most conditions (including all plastics used for beverages!) and in general burying them for long periods should not be considered. They should also be sorted before burial if that's what's going to happen to them, to make it cheaper for someone else to potentially dig them up and do something with them.
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Burying plastics in an empty oil well would be much better than a landfill. Less oxygen too. Throw in some microbes that have evolved to eat plastic and that oil well might be full of oil again in a few hundred years.
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Everything is made of elements. And rearranging elements in different ways (i.e. making different chemical structures) just involves adding or removing energy. So there's no such thing as "non-renewable resources" from an energy standpoint.
You've screwed up your physics.
Due to entropy you have to admit that the only resources that exist are non-renewable.
The ones that we designate renewable can only be designated as such because of the short timescales we decided we look at.
The sun is an important renewable source. But in a few billion years the sun will stop giving off so much energy. It won't renew itself.
And then our planet will freeze and you won't be able to extract energy from waves, another renewable energy source.
You are left with win
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Some of the trash is made out of non-renewable resources,
That's most of the trash, not some.
incinerators have been around for years (Score:5, Insightful)
So I don't know why it's being brought up like something that only started recently.
For myself, I think if you can take out useful stuff to be recycled before you burn the rest for energy, that will be the best. If you blindly burn everything, even potentially recyclable stuff goes up in smoke (and energy).
Anyway I understand EU seems to be starting to think that incinerators are not really climate friendly, although they have been using many incinerator plants for a long time. It will be interesting if different countries have different sorts of thinking about waste incinerators. Unless there is a universal agreement or standards, one country can point to an incinerator and state that it's good for the climate, whereas another may consider it as bad.
Not sure how it will work for climate change agreements.
Composting (Score:2)
Why not compost the stuff that produces methane? Composting is an aerobic process, while anaerobic decomposition is actually what produces methane.
Saying "landfills emit methane" oversimplifies the issue.
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The trash hauling companies use the methane to power their vehicles. Which is why you may have no
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Speak for yourself. My local council collects waste food in the garden bin and composts the lot.
Waste food is no longer in the EU/UK allowed to be used for pig slop because foot and mouth.
No such thing as renewable energy (Score:2)
See the laws of thermodynamics
What we need are energy sources that don't emit carbon compounds into the atmosphere.
Of course that doesn't leave a lot of stuff that we can burn. .Yes I have seen a power plant that burned sulphur, at Awatoto near Napier. They used the SO3 to make fertilizer.
Hydrogen is one substance.
Another is sulphur
no..it's not renewable (Score:2)
as far as calling garbage "renewable', they also label "biomass" power generating stations renewable. Biomass is r
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If the thing being burned came from a renewable source, the power is renewable. Burning is just a way of extracting the energy stored in chemical bonds. It's no more or less renewable than anything else.
But I don't really care what we call it. That's not the point. Of course we should try to produce less waste. Reduce, reuse, recycle. But after we do that, there will still be some waste left. We have to do something with it. We can incinerate it, which breaks down most of the toxins, recovers most o
"renewable" depend on the trash (Score:2)
Switzerland burns *all* trash (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, let's see. You start off with a gully, ravine, sinkhole or whatever and spend several decades gradually filling it up with rubbish. When it's full, you spread a layer of dirt over it and plant some quick-growing ground cover on it to keep it in place. (I'm simplifying here, but this is basically what happens.) After a few more decades, you have some nice, flat land that can be turned into a park, part of a golf course or
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Oh God. It's this how you think landfills work? That is his you create Greg Gerald of health hazards.
No a landfill is a complex system which needs to be carefully managed through non trivial engineering, and rejuvenating the area is orders of magnitude harder than throwing ground cover over it.
You're not just simplifying your ignoring 99% of the work.
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Yes, I did, because the whole point of my post was that, given time, landfills can be turned into recreational land and that the land in question wasn't useful for anything at the start.
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Depends on the trash (Score:2)
Whether it's renewable depends heavily on the trash itself.
Paper products, food waste, etc. are all biomass, and thus fully renewable and carbon neutral fuels.
On the other hand plastics, paints, etc. are (almost always) made from fossil fuels, and are thus no more renewable or carbon-neutral than any other fossil fuel. It's a good way to keep toxic plastic waste out of the landfills (or alternately, to get more use out of fossil fuels before you burn them), but renewable energy it is not.
Betteridge's law of headlines (Score:2)
No.
Common definitions of renewable energy is "energy that is replenished on a human timescale" or "energy replenished at the same rate as it is consumed".
Household trash consists mostly of paper, plastic and then some food waste. Most plastics are made from fossil fuel. Paper is made from trees that take decades to grow.
Therefore, defining "burning trash" as "renewable energy" would be alike to redefining the value of Pi to 3.
Only food is replenished relatively quickly. But there is a more efficient way to
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Right. If waste burning is "renewable" then burning natural gas is also "renewable" because natural gas also produces half the carbon emissions of coal.
But "renewable" doesn't mean "better than what we were doing before" and it doesn't mean "we recover metal". "Renewable" basically means "sustainable" (we never have to stop doing it) which implies that it doesn't significantly increase greenhouse gas concentrations.
Arguably, burning plant-based matter such as paper could be "renewable" (even though it
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I've never seen the take that renewable means human life sustainable. More that it is a fuel source that we (humans) are unlikely to run out of because it keeps regenerating itself.
Trees are renewable because we can keep growing trees (providing our rate of usage and their rate of growth was in balance). Trash is renewable because the process of living creates trash. The content of the trash isn't as important as the fact we generate trash by living.
Is this good for the planet? Not really part of the renewa
Surprised I don't see a simple observation here. (Score:3)
Europe does this (Score:2)
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There have been multiple articles on Sweden's "waste to energy [google.com]" system.
They actually import waste [google.com] to power that system.
And now for something completely different (Score:5, Interesting)
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Back in the 1950s when I was a child in Los Angeles, every house had one of those, in our case in the ally between the two rows of houses. Whenever it got full, Mom would light it off burning up all of the trash. What happened to the ashes and non-flammables that were left, I don't know. I do know that in the mid 50s, they were outlawed because the smoke was believed to be a source of smog. Outlawing them didn't make a difference
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My parents lived in Los Angeles, I believe just after WW2 post-Navy. If I recall correctly, they said that Los Angeles required newspapers to be tied into stacks, and for metal cans to have labels removed, crushed, and bundled for curbside pickup (wartime metal).
In 1971-72, amidst Vietnam war discord and growing ecosystem awareness, and student demands for "significant, meaningful, and relevant", my UCLA Chem 1A professor, took a day off the syllabus to give a lecture on new research connecting automotive
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To be honest, the common "incinerators" that people remember being on residential lots are probably partly responsible for the lack of interest in proper incineration in the US. The didn't burn anywhere near hot enough to completely burn the trash and were just a source of acrid smoke and ash. They were the city equivalent of the nasty trash pile burning you still see sometimes in rural areas.
Landfills? Mines you mean. (Score:3)
Root of the problem (Score:2)
Capitalism currently promotes planned obsolesce and this needs to be counteracted.
Here is one idea: every product should have an estimated use lifetime printed on the label, if it falls short, people will complain in the product reviews.
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How about make less waste in the first place?
While that's a good idea it's not a solution because there will always be waste. The question is how to best dispose of the waste. Burning waste is a good idea because it means less mass of waste to deal with. Landfills are going to be necessary because there's only so much of "reduce, recycle, reuse" we can do. Extracting energy from the burning waste is another good idea because we will always need energy, we can't "reduce, recycle, reuse" our way down to zero.
Capitalism doesn't promote planne
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When I'm done using this body, society can use it for whatever means it sees fit. I won't need it any longer.
The Great Garbage Avalanch of 2505 (Score:2)
Idiocracy is more like a prophecy rather than a nice piece of satire.
https://www.dailymotion.com/vi... [dailymotion.com]
Do the math to know the future of energy. (Score:2)
What energy sources give us the highest energy return on energy invested?
We can get answers to these questions with easy searches of various sources on the internet. Wikipedia might be a good place to start.
EROEI of some types of power plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
What energy sources produce the least CO2?
Scroll down from this link to see the 2020 numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
What energy sources are the safest?
I didn't find a Wikipedia page on that but I did find some other sources
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Solar power removes the land from producing crops, or grazing, or whatever. It's solar power and nothing else.
Unless it's solar power that has been added as dual use, such as a roof or over parking spaces in a parking lot. Then it's a more efficient use of the space. Solar has its own ideal application.
The problem is what to do with millions of tons [irena.org] of cadmium and lead infused glass as installations reach end-of-life or panels fail.
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Solar power has a cost problem. A problem that is not likely to be resolved in time because as solar power technology develops we see competing energy sources also developing.
Rooftop solar PV is something like double to triple the costs of hydro, wind, geothermal, and nuclear fission. Solar thermal power isn't any better on costs than rooftop solar PV. The only way solar power competes on costs is with utility scale solar PV, and that means solar PV is not on a roof or over parking spaces.
The numbers do
Yes (Score:1)
WTAF? (Score:2)
Betterige law most certainly applies here.
A system of energy generation that relies on waste relies on waste , and therefore cannot be called renewable since it requires us to be more wasteful.
And also burning trash puts toxins and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
In practice, nope. And what about the ash? (Score:1)
Not the oldest trash to energy site in the US, Win Waste Innovation in Saugus MA. Their innovation is excess Nitrogen Oxides from their incineration exhaust and they get away with it by buying credits, but we still get to breath it.
Their ash goes in a unlined landfill that was scheduled to close in the 1980's. And it's in an environmentally sensitive wetland area.
For every four tons of waste that are incinerated, one ton of ash is created. This ash is filled with heavy metals and toxic chemicals like mercu