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RJWe are not running out of landfill places-- we're just filling up the ones close to major metro centers. The trash can be shipped to more remote places where the new income will be appreciated.. As I've documented here several times before, the US will only use up ~1000 sq mi of space for landfill over the next century, while we will pave over 150,000 sq mi, just to keep things in perspective. Total US land area 19 Million sq mi.
Which takes us back to "Not in my backyard". Waste 'generators' have to learn how to handle their own problems and not pass them on to the next ******. All of that garbage hauling to the 'remote places' takes a heavy toll on our highways and the taxpayers pick up the bill. You also have to toss in the cost of the fuel and the carbon emissions from the trucks. One other point is that amount of garbage that never makes it to the landfill; some blows out the trucks when they have torn tarps. We used to take a lot of the NYC garbage about 35 miles to my north. You could actually follow the trail of garbage as it came into our state and turned off to go to the landfill. At that time we were know as one of the dirtiest counties in the state and most of that garbage wasn't even ours!
It sounds like a great idea but the problem is money. Plastics can be recycled but suffer the same problem as glass- it costs more money to turn a plastic or glass bottle into another plastic or glass bottle than it does to just make a new bottle. It's not a technological problem it's an economic one. I doubt this company's $100/gallon of gas is going to solve the problem either. I worked in a plastics manufacturing plant. Some of the products we produced actually came out better using recycled plastic compared to the virgin pellets. The problem with recycling plastics is not a manufacturing process, it already exists (the same equipment that produces plastic products works equally well regardless if you're using new or recycled plastic) the problem is that the machines for the most part can only accept PLASTIC. No labels, residues, original contents etc. The problem is that there is no cost effective way to clean and sort the various consumer products into a form that can economically be reused.
Most of the "recycled" glass is ground up and spread into the landfill. It's not "recycling" per se but it does take the place of other products they would use for that purpose. Sometimes they use it under roadways. But a glass bottle that is recycled is unlikely to become another glass bottle.
Metals are the only consumer containers that truly get recycled that I know of. Most aluminum cans are made into cans or other consumer products again because it's cheaper than making new aluminum.
I talked to a guy in the algae business and asked him what happened to all the experiments about using algae to produce bio-diesel. He explained that the process works but at the end of the day you can sell a gallon of algae biodiesel at market rate of $4.00/gallon or you can use the same business to produce spirulina that sells for $400/gallon. And here's the kicker- guess how they grow algae? They feed it chemical fertilizer made from petroleum so you're effectively using algae to convert petroleum to a petroleum substitute and generating a lot of waste in the process.
Last edited by terracore; 08-25-2019 at 08:44 PM..
Reason: excessive whitespace
I talked to a guy in the algae business and asked him what happened to all the experiments about using algae to produce bio-diesel. He explained that the process works but at the end of the day you can sell a gallon of algae biodiesel at market rate of $4.00/gallon or you can use the same business to produce spirulina that sells for $400/gallon. And here's the kicker- guess how they grow algae? They feed it chemical fertilizer made from petroleum so you're effectively using algae to convert petroleum to a petroleum substitute and generating a lot of waste in the process.
Absolutely right. Good post. (can't rep you again yet)
As for bio-diesel, consider it as a geometry problem---
Oil is the remnant of green plants growing to heights of tens of meters, with closely packed cells, and growing over millions of square miles of territory over millions of years.
Algae are unicellular with a need for a certain amount of surrounding space for adequate delivery of nutrients & gas exchange, grown in vats that can be no more than a few feet high in order to get enough sunlight, and limited to growth over human time scales (wks, months, a few yrs) to get a practical yield.
Exactly how much space are we to allocate to grow this stuff in order to make a significant dent in the yearly demand for fuel?
Same argument against used cooking oil as automotive fuel: it works but not enough restaurants to supply very many cars.
Here is an newer article on the Copenhagen incinerator: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019...sh-incinerator. It sounds as if they are going in the right direction and reducing the amount of waste going to the landfills. At the same time they are producing energy. In a way they are turning plastics, as well as other burnable material, to fuel. They are also not being that selective about what is going into the furnace; thanks to the newer technology.
The nitrous oxide production is more of a theoretical problem than a practical one. NO2 is also a GHG, technically speaking, but it's absorption spectrum is limited to some pretty sharp spikes at just a few wavelengths, so it doesn't really contribute very much at all to blocking energy. ...NO2 can react with water vapor to form H2NO3, nitrous acid, which could lead to acid rain. I don't know how much of a problem that really is-- certainly not as bad as the sulfuric acid problem from hi S coal or Diesel fuel.
NO, OTOH. is what the Libs really want to eliminate from car exhaust. As everyone knows, NO is Laughing Gas. If there was more LaughingGas in the air we breath, there would be more happy people, and as we know, only unhappy people vote Dem. Right ?
The Copenhagen incinerator is really not new. Baltimore has had a waste to energy incinerator since 1985.
I quote from the link I just posted: "All but one of the roughly 75 trash incinerators operating in the U.S. are much older than Copenhagen's Amager Resource Center — the newest opened in Florida in 2015. Older plants had to be retrofitted with modern pollution controls in the 1990s to meet new standards." Then they go on to explain the differences between the older plants and this newer plant.
I quote from the link I just posted: "All but one of the roughly 75 trash incinerators operating in the U.S. are much older than Copenhagen's Amager Resource Center — the newest opened in Florida in 2015. Older plants had to be retrofitted with modern pollution controls in the 1990s to meet new standards." Then they go on to explain the differences between the older plants and this newer plant.
In that link there is a quote from Peter Blinksbjerg, chief engineer of Amager:
"First of all is, when you come to the old plants, it's the boiler efficiency. A bad combustion process gives a lot of organic micropollutants like dioxins that have to be removed," he tells Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd. "The other ... is that the flue gas cleaning is much more efficient, and besides that, it takes out extra heat from the flue gas, which we in Denmark can sell for district heating."
One would really have to look at the design and efficiency of the older plants compared to theirs to determine the difference.
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