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    To Burn or Recycle, a Stupid Question

    By Michael Wolraich on Tue, 04/13/2010 - 8:56pm | Potpourri

    Today's New York Times explored the topic of trash incineration, an increasingly popular method of waste disposal in Europe. These are not your daddy's incinerators. The new "waste-to-energy" plants filter pollutants and produce electricity. Cities can save landfill space, avoid expensive trash transport, and produce alternative energy at the same time. While incineration does release CO2 into the atmosphere, it produces less CO2 than would be released by allowing the trash to decompose in a landfill, not to mention the fossil fuels burned during transportation. Thus, clean incineration would seem like a no-brainer for a city like New York, which exports four million tons of trash every year to landfills as far away as Virginia.

    But New York City isn't seriously considering incineration. Nickolas J. Themelis, a Columbia University engineering professor and waste-to-energy proponent, complained,

    It's so irrational; I've almost given up with New York. It's like you're in a village of Hottentots who look up and see an airplane -- when everybody else is using airplanes -- and they say, "No, we won’t do it, it's too scary."

    One hindrance to U.S. adoption of the waste-to-energy is the classic NIMBY problem. No one wants to live near an incinerator because of pollution fears.

    But there are also criticisms from within the environmental movement. For instance, according to Laura Haight, a senior environmental associate with the New York Public Interest Research Group,

    Incinerators are really the devil...Once you build a waste-to-energy plant, you then have to feed it. Our priority is pushing for zero waste.

    Like many environmentalists, Haight has allowed her idealism to interfere with her objectives. "Zero waste" is a wonderful ideal, and we should aim to recycle as much as possible, but recycling everything is a pipe dream that is neither technically nor sociologically realistic. Thus, Haight would have us reject an achievable solution because it would interfere with the realization of her unrealizable dream.

    I'm with Themelis. Burn it.

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    Comments

    Excellent point. And doesn't New York have ridiculous piles of garbage in the harbor? That's a great place for an incinerator/generator combo.


    by Doctor Cleveland on Tue, 04/13/2010 - 9:01pm

    Oh shit. Something I know about. A lot about. Apologies & warnings:

    Absolutely, 100%, no.

    1st off, VERY big money is involved in this, and this is an industry with deep mob ties. No joke. In France, major companies do things like firebomb each others trucks. etc. Combine this with the expected cash to flow from a 400,000 tonne burner, operating for 25 years at $100/tonne. What you see is a money-printing machine. What you also see is a bottom-feeding industry (waste management) in which the officers and regulators and administrators can be bought off. So, for starters, much ugliness in the "who."

    2nd, this line has ALWAYS been the call of the incinerator companies. "Look at Europe. And look at these fabulous new generations of filters." Yeah. Now look for ONE operating to these kinds of standards in the English-speaking world. You won't - and can't-  find them. Not one. Lemme give some inside dope on the Edmonton incinerator, running in North London. It's emissions were vanishing, non-existent, according to all the official numbers. Til some guys from Greenpeace miraculously got in, scaled the stack, took over the plant. At the top of the stack, they found 4" of thick black goo, which ran all the way down inside. Tested afterward, it showed enormous levels of dioxins/furans - 1700 TEQ. Edmonton also put hidden cameras on employees, who showed deadly fly ash being shovelled by hand... And, in the nicest touch, the ash being used in building blocks for home construction.

    Oh yeah, the mob thing? Edmonton got caught sneaking NUCLEAR waste in from Eastern European sites, where they were then "burning" it - i.e. spreading it over the city, where it couldn't be traced, but didn't need to face costly disposal.

    I was also heavily involved in Newcastle's incinerator disaster at a place called Byker, where dioxin-laden fly ash was used to form foot paths on the allotment gardens of the poor. Where it got ingested, taken in with the food, and especially with the hens that run loose on the allotments. So we basically had dioxin-bomb eggs being eaten by poor children. Let me say this. Right now, Newcastle England (a major city) has dozens (yes, dozens) of locations with higher dioxin levels than are found anywhere in Vietnam, from all their Agent Orange sprayings. They used "leading edge incineration technology from Sweden."

    The list of financial disasters is as long as my arm. They absolutely DO work against recycling/composting (ask yourself, precisely what it is that they BURN? They want paper/board first - the #1 recyclable - then plastics. you really want to set one of these up to burn plastic? Diapers?) Their operation as energy-producing entities is itself problematic, as they are "must run" and thus produce real inflexibilities in grid-systems like Denmark's.

    Ok. Stopping now. Oh. You can aim for Zero Waste, but then instead of burning the residual, just throw it in an anaerobic digester. That'll give you much of the energy back, and not risk the air pollution.

    Sorry for this. But I've watched these articles come out from time to time for almost 30 years now, and each time, it's the same stuff.


    by quinn esq on Tue, 04/13/2010 - 10:35pm

    OK, I'll bow to the better educated. (I knew that I would get burned on this one because I didn't have time to research.) My argument was predicated on the claim that the incinerators are clean. If not, then f*ck 'em. How close are the anaerobic digesters to feasibility? It sounds like some kind of Star Wars desert monster.

    But as for Zero Waste, forget it. That should never be an argument for not pursuing a possible solution--ever. Insofar as recycling works, great. But it's no holy panacea to be guarded like some sacred ritual.

    PS Speaking of mafia connections, recycling operations aren't exactly run by the Pope. But maybe that's a poor analogy these days.


    by Michael Wolraich on Wed, 04/14/2010 - 1:54pm

    And anyway, wouldn't "Zero Waste" be against the laws of thermodynamics?


    by Doctor Cleveland on Wed, 04/14/2010 - 2:22pm

    I believe that you are allowed to use energy to achieve Zero Waste.

    What I want to know is when we get to have waste-fueled fusion reactors in our flying, time-traveling Delorian's. That would be cool.


    by Michael Wolraich on Wed, 04/14/2010 - 3:18pm

    Sorry for that, G. But I spent most of 7 years in that field.

    Anaerobic digesters work, in large numbers, already. So that helps. It's not magic, just organic stuff breaking down, then you capture the methane.

    Zero Waste is actually not as impossible as people at first think. There are now whole countries recycling/composting 60%, 70% and up - and lots of individual communities well above that. The key to getting the remaining %'s is to look at the design of products, to make them so they CAN be recycled or composted etc.

    See, if you don't set the bar that high, the incineration industry comes in - and this is what I had to live through from 1995-2002 - and says, "at most 15% of all waste can be recycled, so we need 25 year contracts for the remaining 85%." Then, after years of fighting, they raise the theoretical maximum to... 25%. And so on. {Meanwhile, the entire UK has gone from 5% when I started to 37% today.}

    As for the mob and recycling, some of my buddies were the early innovators in the field, and they have great stories of recycling in places like New Jersey. Yeah.... mob.... just a little.

    But mostly, fusion power from banana peels and beer cans.

    I'm down with that.

     


    by quinn esq on Thu, 04/15/2010 - 1:16am

    No need to apologize. I appreciate the correction from the expert, though I would prefer that the expert not be Canadian. So how did the countries and communities hitting 60% and up accomplish it?


    by Michael Wolraich on Thu, 04/15/2010 - 9:45am

    I know absolutely nothing about this topic. Except I had always heard something slightly different than the apoplexy above regarding fly ash being used in home construction:

    "Fly ash use in concrete qualifies for credit under the U.S. Green Building Council’s popular LEED™ rating system for sustainable construction. The environmental benefits of fly ash use are frequently cited by numerous government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."

    http://www.thehealthyhome.net/archives.php?tale=11

    But perhaps this is just one of many Sonoma mob front-architects.


    by Steve (not verified) on Fri, 04/16/2010 - 6:55pm

    That's fly ash from burning coal - not from burning garbage. I donno whether it's safe or not, but it's different stuff.


    by quinn esq on Tue, 04/20/2010 - 3:29pm

    There are US incinerators and then there are European incinerators. The Europeans don't work on the cheap and install very expensive scrubbers for pollutants on the smoke stack. Using the lowest bidder here in the USA and cutting costs to maximize profits where-ever they can usually means a higher percentage of heavy metals and pollutants entering the atmosphere and area around the incinerator. If the companies promoting incineration to power could demonstrate that the scrubbers are very high performance and provide transparency on pollutant levels exiting the stack in real time, maybe they would get more support here at home.

    An incinerator in Munich Germany captured more than 98.9% of all pollutants exiting the process when I was there. What they did with the ash I am uncertain but it is well documented that the incinerator in Detroit is not of that caliber and is causing harm. The city of Windsor, Canada did a study on the pollution crossing the river to it 6 miles away from the incinerator and found it toxic.

    If quality and performance were the first priorities over cost I'm sure we would all breath easier. I prefer zero waste to incineration as the smarter option but if we are considering incineration it can't be done on the cheap and be a healthy alternative.


    by Zerotrashtalk (not verified) on Tue, 04/20/2010 - 3:20pm