Trash Power: Dumping Energy Into A Grid Near You

Even zero-waste events produce... waste. Maybe it's composted, maybe it's recycled, but it has to go somewhere. But, let's say your party wasn't a zero-waste event, or your house isn't a zero-waste home. Let's say, hypothetically, you sometimes throw things away.

For shame!

Well, forward-thinking environmentalists have got a potential use for your -- OK, fine, our -- uncompostable, unrecyclable waste: Let's turn it into power.

EcoGeek's Jaymi Heimbuch wrote earlier this week that Ottawa has approved a gasification power plant, which takes trash to high temperatures, without actually incinerating it, and turns it into a gas. According to the post, the plant will "daily convert 400 metric tons of trash to 21 megawatts of net electricity."

That's nothing to sneeze at.

The facility will be North America's first, but similar plants in Europe and Asia can be used as examples. And the new plant likely won't be lonely for very long. Hawaii also approved $100 M in bonds for a gasification plant using similar technology, and competitor Ze-gen is starting up a pilot plant on a much smaller scale in Massachusetts that will use molten rock to break down garbage.

Discovery News' Alyssa Danigelis reports that an Australian suburb is turning trash into energy starting riiiight abouuut... now.

This month the Macarthur Resource Recovery Park in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, began accepting its first batch of garbage from 300,000 people in the area. First the recyclables are sorted out and then billions of microbes (more bugs!) in giant tanks gobble up the refuse, producing methane for power. Unlike other setups that only snag 70 percent of the gas, this plant is expected to capture 100 percent of the methane emitted inside oxygen-free tanks.

The methane-capturing part is used in plenty of places, including breweries, which clean water (which had been used, incidentally, for cleaning) with dirt-eating microbes that excrete methane, which is captured and used to heat up water, which is boiled to at the beginning of the brewing process, which -- whew, don't get us started, and look for a sustainable beer post soon.

Point is, now people are finally using that on a large scale!

Comments

[zizyphus]

Biochar production is another good solution for organic waste materials. Side products of biodiesel fuel, or electrical production, plus the biochar, which enriches the soil it is returned to and sequesters lots and lots of carbon. Projects underway in Australia, New Zealand, and US.

Many small scale experimental projects ongoing around the world– that is the beauty of biochar, you can make your own. Why haul your yard trimmings to the dump, make biochar, add it to your soil, increase soil fertility, reduce use of fertilizers.
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/biochar/Biochar_home.htm

[lapoutlander]

If you drill down to the blog and the company's website:

It would be the second such plant in North America, they already operate a 100 tonne gasification demonstration plant in Ottawa (that is the good news)

And the success of the new 400 tonne (four 100 tonne sub-plant) endeavor depends on them being able to reduce running costs by decreasing the temperature of the plasma And of course some toxins do get released http://www.plascoenergygroup.com/?Environmental_Performance (that is the bad news)

And it is run by a smooth talker who it is said "Late in 2004, Mr. Bryden avoided personal bankruptcy by using his excellent negotiating skills to convince his creditors to accept $600,000 instead of almost $100M of debt." (that is possibly the really bad news)

[lapoutlander]

Oh and the weird news:
Plasco Energy Corp - six degrees of...
1 - Run by CEO Rod Bryden
2 - Who could not pay his Senators Hockey team's debts in 2004
3 - Because lender Covanta Energy Corp went bankrupt
4 - After the ENRON debacle caused their collapse
5 - Which occurred because Phil Gramm deregulated everything
6 - So Kenny Boy's Texas twin could be the "CEO" president of the USA.

So George Bush got the trash fire burning in another country's capital (I see a corner dedicated in the president's library, an ever-burning trash can, beside Cheney's shredder... ).

[TXfemmom]

Every garbage dump should have to do this, and it should be mandated by law.

I have read that all the manure produced by cows, chickens, pigs, etc. can be put into tanks, heated, but here in TX they would not have to heat the stuff externally, and then they recover the methane to create enough energy to power every home in small towns. The end product can be used for animal bedding, and the liquid portion is an excellent liquid fertilizer which does not contain samonella or e-coli. Talk about a win-win situation.

[McSteele]

Turning waste into energy is the best alternative energy and environmental solution available today. Gasification of municipal solid waste at high degrees, with virtually no emissions, creating a clean gas that can be burned as a fuel to create electricity or converted into a biodiesel product is a proven, cost-efficient, sustainable, renewable energy process. SilvaGas, an Atlanta GA company has the only proven, commercial scale biomass gasification technology that is ready for market application.

The system produces reduced emissions of greenhouse gases at 98% below conventional fossil fuel plants and 40% below conventional biomass plants, with near zero net carbon emissions on a closed loop (life-cycle) basisStand-alone power generation using Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) as feedstock. The disposal of Municipal Solid Waste (“MSW”) is an increasingly serious problem throughout the world. By retrofitting incineration furnaces and implementing conversion technologies, landfills and other waste facilities can produce affordable electricity and qualify for renewable power production tax credits.

The SilvaGas process is at the forefront of technologies that can affordably use MSW to generate electricity. Importantly, SilvaGas’ oxygen-free process also eliminates the formation of toxic chemicals such as the chlorine released by PVC packaging. The gasification of MSW provides a solution for waste disposal that offers an immediate advantage over landfilling, mass burn and biosolids dispensation practices.

[jsarets]

We've also created bacteria that convert the output of waste gasification (CO2 and H2) directly into ethanol, which an easier medium to deal with compared to methane and less hazardous than methanol. These bacteria are genetically-manipulated cousins of "extremophile" bacteria that form the basis of remarkable dark ecosystems that flourish around volcanic fissures in the ocean floor.

Ultimately, there are only two primary sources of energy in the natural world: sunlight from above and hydrogen (sulfide) gas from below. We currently don't have a viable inorganic process for fixating carbon dioxide into larger hydrocarbons, alcohols, or carbohydrates, but we have two methods each for harnessing the energy of sunlight (photovoltaic and solar concentration) and hydrogen gas (proton-exchange and combustion).

It will be interesting to see how hydrogen fuel cells compete with hydrogen bacteria and how synthetic solar competes with vegetal, algal, and/or cyanobacterial photosynthesis.

[KillTheMessenger]

The best way to generate electricity with trash is to create less trash. Everything else is just a gimmick approach to a serious problem.

[CaptainObvious]

I don't think you need to worry about creating a demand for trash. And technically, they are generating electricity by creating less trash.

This is a great idea if you ask me.

[jsarets]

To play devil's advocate... Less trash implies less consumption implies less production implies fewer jobs implies social unrest. Unless we want to be wards of a socialist state, then we have to keep everybody gainfully employed. Furthermore, we're always going to make trash, even if we decrease the quantity, so we might as well use it to facilitate useful work by harnessing its embodied energy.

[bryansmith]

I've been preaching methane forever... EVERY trash dump in America is REQUIRED to collect the stuff for environmental reasons. some use it to power their fleet of trash trucks, others just burn it into the atmosphere in order to comply with fed regulations (carbon dioxide is less damaging to the atmosphere than methane)

[rabrophy]

There are a lot of good ideas out there, but I can't see how they can ever get any government support while we retain our present political system of graft for political favors.
Corn based ethanol is a good example. It causes more pollution than it elevates, but it sounds good in sound bytes and "gets" the farm vote so it gets big $$$ from the government.

Wind, solar and recycling can't pay so they can't play

[research]

Not so bad as that. 20GW of Wind installed 2007, fantastic new batteries in dewalt tools going into plug in hybrids, and a solar cell making machine that is churning out over 1GW of cells/year.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/users/profile/research