Oslo is turning garbage into energy and is running out of garbage | Hacker News Reader

Oslo is turning garbage into energy and is running out of garbage

nytimes.com

77 pointsdanso60 comments

> Yet though Oslo considered the Italian garbage, it preferred to stick with what it said was the cleaner and safer English waste. “It’s a sensitive question,” Mr. Mikkelsen said.

This is literally the most intriguing thing in my life right now. What a tease. Does anyone have insight into why Italian garbage is less safe?

The Mafia. They control some of the Italian garbage and you are not sure what the garbage actually contain.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/200... http://scienceline.org/2009/09/blog-easter-mafia-toxic-waste...

Oh, you haven’t seen Gomorrah? You’re in for a treat!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0929425/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(film)

Will. Do. Grazie.

Prego. It’s available on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/gomorrah/id373145855

Also on Netflix: http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Gomorrah/70100401?locale=e...

Highly recommended viewing. Officially, it’s fiction, but Italian friends have told me that it’s an accurate portrayal of what goes on in Italy.

Oslo is powering their city by putting black ash into the air, which absorbs heat from sunlight, slightly increasing the amount of energy in all of our environmental systems. The place is powered by externalities, just like China. This solution is no better than coal-generated electricity, and this feel-good article is no more useful than clean-coal articles.

Don't some of the modern systems have processes that mitigate the released ash?

I found their recycling systems to be even more impressive sounding than the garbage incineration

My understanding is that the garbage would be burnt anyway so better use it for heating.

But the ash doesn't stick around, does it? Do you have an order-of-magnitude estimate for the heating effects of the ash? I'm guessing it's trivial compared to carbon offset.

There seems to be some debate about whether particulate matter has a net-warming or net-cooling effect. It's difficult to estimate empirically, because there are so many uncontrolled variables.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#Aerosols

Ash represents incomplete combustion. I'm pretty the engineers are motivated to ensure the ash is a minor waste product compared the gasses, but somebody should check me on that.

Hmm. I was under the impression that burning garbage is different in that you are burning carbon that is already in play in the carbon cycle system - unlike burning coal, which without human intervention would never be introduced into the environment at such a rapid pace. I could be wrong! I was disappointed by the lack of an explanation, or even links to background on the science of this process. Just a puff/fluff piece IMHO.

It would really depend on what is being burnt. If it is primarily food waste, paper products, natural fibers, wood, etc.. then yeah; all of that carbon was already "in the system". If they are burning lots of garbage made from petrochemicals then that garbage is basically just another fossil fuel.

As I understand it, the real issue with "clean coal" is not the soot but rather the CO2. Depending on what this garbage actually is, the CO2 problem isn't really a problem in this case.

I found a case study about Oslo's waste management strategy: http://www.c40cities.org/c40cities/oslo/city_case_studies/wa...

The study emphasizes their focus on composting for food products and recycling everything else, so a minimum of waste needs to be incinerated or dumped. Also, Oslo closed their landfill in 2007, and it seems they burn the residual gasses (methane?) for electricity, if not burning all of their old trash. The report focuses on home recycling requirements, but does not mention commercial or industrial waste, which are by far larger generators of waste.

So, it seems likely that the incinerated waste is not "in-system".

Surely burning that methane is "in-system". Methane has a 20-year GWP of 72 and, unless my chemistry is far more rusty than I think it is, 1 mol of methane will burn with oxygen to form 1 mol of CO2. From a global warming standpoint, it would actually be wildly irresponsible to not burn that methane. In fact this seems to be the basis for the EPA's "Landfill Methane Outreach Program".

What's GWP? See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global-warming_potential

Aye. This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global-warming_potential#Values) chart is important to consider too. I gave the 20-year GWP value for CH4, but CH4 does not last as long in the atmosphere as CO2 so that value drops as time progresses. However even the 500-year GWP for CH4 is still above CO2.

> in the system

That doesn't make it better. We have too much carbon in the atmosphere. We should be growing corn for the sole purpose of pouring it into oil wells and coal shafts.

It is certainly better than adding more greenhouse gasses, which is what fossil fuels do. Burning, for example, wood obviously does not reduce greenhouse gasses (nor does anyone claim that), but from a greenhouse gas standpoint it is clearly way better than digging up even more CO2. There are certainly other very important factors to consider, but if the discussion is global warming than you can give me a tree farm over a coal mine any day.

Dumping corn down mineshafts seems like it would be pissing in the ocean. Maybe instead of pissing in the ocean we should be experimenting with dumping fertilizers and nutrients into the ocean to trigger algae blooms. If that works as the theories say it should, and is seen to have acceptable consequences, that is something that we could actually do at scale (and without further subsidization of corn...).

Which would largely turn back into CO2 once the bacteria do their thing.

Erm, I believe it would turn back into oil and coal, etc.

We're not entirely clear on how that works, and our best estimates are that it takes on the order of hundreds of thousands of years and requires quite a bit of pressure. The proposal above would basically be a deep landfill, and generally what will come from landfills in our lifetime is methane, CO2, dirty water, and a lot of garbage sitting around.

Sitting in a hole in the ground is from whence it came. Trash collectors should be getting substantial carbon credits. Their credits should increase the deeper they manage to bury the stuff. Sending it into the atmosphere, especially near the Arctic circle, if atrociously bad.

"This solution is no better than coal-generated electricity"

I'm not sure that's true at all. The only way a waste-to-energy plant can import waste from cross-borders is by having R1 status, R1 being a measure of energy recovery from the municipal waste that is burned [1].

On top of this, the plants (generally) recycle the plastic / metal that isn't burned, sell the fuel ash (to stabilize roads, etc), cogenerate steam from additional energy production, and either sell back to the municipalities the natural gas generated by the organic waste digestors or use it to generate additional electricity.

[1] http://www.cewep.eu/information/publicationsandstudies/state...

This scenario plays out in the board game "Power Grid." It's a game about running power plants and one of the 4 resources is garbage. It's a great late game fuel, but it can get scarce. http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid

Very good game if you like Catan-style games.

Agreed. I've heard good things for a while, but I was very impressed when I played it last week for the first time.

Also (this is why I was tempted to post about it on HN), it's very heavy on number crunching and has a nice CS feel to it. Placing your cities is, I think, an instance of minimum spanning trees. Thought MST has a lot of applications, interestingly the first algorithm for finding them was invented in 1926 for "efficient electrical coverage of Moravia." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bor%C5%AFvka%27s_algorithm

I'm still not convinced this is a viable solution for waste management (not that there's a simple alternative), given the environmental implications. Yes, air pollution is pretty regulated and has been reduced significantly since the 80's[1], but the residues resulting from the filtering process are still heavily toxic and it's not clean by any means[2].

[1] http://www.seas.columbia.edu/earth/wtert/sofos/Waste_Inciner...

[2] Section 10: http://www.ecomed.org.uk/content/IncineratorReport_v3.pdf

Can you please come to India and help us. We need this very badly.

That was it came to my mind when I read the article!: "Why not expand to India?"

Being a tropical country, India does not need much of indoor heating. Fine option for heating water.

India needs electricity though, and this can be used to generate electricity.

Doesn't seem to be that efficient though. Random stuff doesn't burn as hot as coal or oil.

Or process heat for industry, that's how it is used in my home town.

Or desalinating water. India needs clean water, no?

Not really, they just drink it from the river.

Why would you assume the river water in India is clean? India has major problems with water pollution[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_pollution_in_India

That was kinda my point...

Hah! I just posted this. Would it make air pollution worse... or just the same?

I always thought burning garbage is really bad for the environment. Aren't there dangerous chemicals that are released if the garbage is not incinerated?

It seems that the garbage is sorted through before they burned it.

At least in the US, a modern incinerator produces cleaner exhaust gases than a power plant does. This is because the air quality restrictions are quite tight, and building an incinerator from the ground up with those restrictions in mind results in exhaust flues with filters to catalyze by products into non-aerosols.

That said, providing heat is the best use for this since even low grade heat (100 - 150 degrees C) is usable for heating buildings and water for washing etc. But you can't pull a lot of electricity out of it with steam turbines.

This would work very well for the central heating systems (mostly coal or gas based) of northern China. We also have plenty of garbage to burn. But I wouldn't trust the government to implement it with the correct environmental safeguards.

As others have noted, you can sort out the worst garbage and install filters, and modern filters are very good.

It’s still worse for the air than putting the garbage in landfills, but landfills have their problems too.

It's better than landfill without methane recovery, greenhouse gas wise.

Source? Mole for mole, I'm sure methane is worse than CO2, but how much of the carbon mass in a landfill goes to methane?

Methane is tens of times worse than CO2, so burning would probably have to release quite a lot of carbon to match methane.

I think (but don't have proof) that it still is better if none of it escapes as methane.

If you don't turn your waste into heat, presumably, you would dig up oil, refine it, transport it to where you need it and burn that oil. Chances are that produces more CO2 than the collection and burning of waste fairly close to where it is produced (transporting waste from Italy to Norway would probably be a different matter)

Also, the controlled burning of waste (typically at high temperatures) can break down molecules that, if dropped in a landfill, may make it into the atmosphere or ground water.

More arguments fore/against at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration#Debate. I find it telling that quite a few of the 'against' arguments compare incineration not with landfills, but with other technologies/solutions.

What about using thermo depolymerization?

Basically, using heat and pressure, turn literally anything that is carbon-based into water, natural gas and oil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

http://robertrapier.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/tdp12.png

http://www.stvnbrgs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2013-01-2...

Slightly related fun fact: Oslo also uses recovered heat from sewage to heat homes.

http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/4032

History-less american barbarians! :)

Sweden started this craze: actually Norway exported their garbage there:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/28/163823839/swe...

Or see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4702319

The word you're looking for is ahistorical.

Lest we of the US be inclined to scoff, most of what we burn is garbage - coal, oil, gas, dead wood, all remnants of dead life. The world has abundant natural energies, but for a century we've feasted on the easiest. Now the bill is due.

I suggest expansion into Mumbai... plagued by trash, lacking reliable energy.

Unlike a developed country like Norway, doing this in Mumbai almost makes sense. Get them quickly up to a level where they can hop over a bunch of our generational mistakes and go straight to solar.

But in a developed country with abundant hydroelectric resources, this is shameful. Unless they recover all the waste products, including all the gases and ash, and bury them in old mines.

The heat is not useful for generating electricity, it could be used to heat buildings, but I bet that is hardly a concern in Mumbai.

Could existing landfills be mined to supply this need?

There was a recent episode of Bang Goes the Theory [1] about how the UK has started to turn landfills into "bioreactors" [2], by covering them with earth (essentially turning them into parks). Underneath the top-soil layer, the landfill is covered with a layer that traps the methane and sends it into a methane-capturing system.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s1mzl

I guess we can ship our to be recycled electronic parts to them instead of Chinese landfills then.

Apparently Oslo needs to come help me clean my apartment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com