Couple of companies in Evanston Indiana want to be the first in the world to provide full-scale waste-to-energy plants with processes previously used only in demonstration projects. This means turning not just a specific, controlled industrial waste stream, but the insanity that is municipal solid waste.
“The thorny question of where to build such a plant is yet to be answered.”
[Via the delicious Wasted Food blog:]
Using excreta in the digesters helps manage human waste at source and avoids ground water contamination. BIOTECH’S use of latrines is considered to be a major breakthrough in combating water and air-pollution. Mrs Anna Benedict from Kumbalangi island panchayat, comments: “Before we had the plant, all the waste went into the sea. Now we have a latrine and biogas plant, the waste is treated properly.”
BIOTECH is a company that sets up waste digesters in Kerala. A small digester for a home can produce two hours’ worth of gas a day. The effluent is suitable for fertilizer. Larger plants use waste from the municipal fish market.
Makes me wonder what the local municpal fish markets do with their waste.
Treehugger points to a portable biomass generator as well.
Swedes push for more incineration (kind of an old article but fuck it):
“In remote areas, for example, it would not be viable to transport waste long distance for recycling. It would make more sense to burn it locally and use the process to generate electricity.”
Greenpeace disagrees:
“It’s a nonsense to say incineration could ever be better than recycling. That would be a regressive step.”
I like the “burn it locally” idea. I mean, really locally. How quckly would people develop alternative packaging and waste reuse and reduction schemes if the alternative was that they personally had to burn their own garbage?
My personal fatasies aside, this is a good conversation to have. Recycling is not the panacea some (though I don’t know who) might think it is. A bit of recyclable material still needs to be sorted, trucked, and processed. Will doing that use more energy than putting in the ground or burning it? Will more toxic chemicals be used to recycle a plastic bottle or a tire than to create a new one from raw materials? Does burning plastic bottles in an incinerator potentially generate enough energy to offset the pollution?
If you don’t want to have to think about these problems, the answer is source reduction. Tusly should our powers of cogitation be employed.
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