Monday, May 11, 2009
Tell Us Something We Don't Know
Everybody knows recycling is a good thing. But it’s work and some of us feel we’re wasting our time recycling when we read that what we put in the recycle bin only ends up in the trash heap anyway. And it does, no question about it, when the recycling market is down or “flush”, and communities have no place to put recyclables, they go to the trash with everything else. From there, the trash is shipped out of state and buried, literally. Sometimes it’s still buried right here in Massachusetts and sometimes it gets burned and turned into energy.
And everybody knows that producing energy is a good thing too. No matter what you think about petroleum or coal, coming up with other ways to produce energy can’t be bad; for no other reason than to cut back on America’s reliance on those two traditional energy sources. From a community standpoint, if the two components are combined, then recycling can produce income and trash can produce energy.
About 15 years ago, communities began shutting down “town incinerators” because of the air pollution they produced and that was a good thing. These days however, technological advances in the trash to energy market have made the “burning” of trash not only beneficial but less harmful to the environment.
We offer the following two scenarios as a simple way of looking at what produces more profit, more energy and causes less environmental concern.
This is what happens to the waste produced in a typical household today, keeping in mind the equipment and labor expended to accomplish this.
- 1. Waste gets separated into at least two piles, recyclables and trash.
- 2. It gets picked up by two trucks, one for recyclables and one for trash.
- 3. The recyclables get brought to a transfer station (trucked to another community) where they are further separated into different types of recyclables such as paper, glass, metal and plastics. Some of the plastics require further separation.
- 4. A large portion of the trash is brought to a transfer facility where it is loaded onto larger trucks (utilizing loading machinery) and shipped to landfills, usually out of state.
- 5. A smaller portion of the trash is trucked to a facility that burns it and converts it to energy such as electricity. The conversion process also requires some sorting and loading equipment and produces some air pollutants.
- 6. The sorted recyclables are sold to and brought to businesses, some as far away as China, that use equipment and labor to clean, melt and grind them into products that can be re-used and sold.
- 7. When these businesses don’t need these recyclables, they are brought to the transfer facility, that brings them to the trash to energy plant or the landfills, just like the regular trash.
- 8. Once at the landfill, the trash is dumped, then spread and compacted with machinery and then covered with drainage mats, encapsulating materials and soil, then seeded. The seeding usually requires materials to prevent erosion and the encapsulated heap needs to be vented.
- 9. This now covered land mass of trash cannot be used for many years, if ever.
Did we miss anything? Pretty simple.
Now, in the future, if communities were to invest in a local trash to energy facility the scenario would go something like this:
- 1. Waste gets separated into at least two piles, recyclables and trash.
- 2. It gets picked up by two trucks, one for recyclables and one for trash.
- 3. Both trucks bring the waste to the same facility where recyclables are sorted further and trash is converted to energy.
- 4. Whatever recyclables are produced either before or after the incineration process are sold on the recyclables market. Whatever recyclables cannot be sold will also be converted to energy.
Even Simpler.
POSTED BY STAN at May 11, 2009
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