Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy
pachamama.org
pachamama.org
I don't know but I assume that part of the reason that Swedes are able to deal effectively with the trash is that they sort it properly at the source, so that they more easily can process it.
When I read stuff like this it honestly makes me homesick. I've lived half my life on the left side of the political spectrum (Sweden/France) and the other half on the right side here in the US. I love it in SF, but this supposedly "progressive" city has - especially considering how many smart people that live here - an appallingly poor understanding of how to architect a civilized society.
There is no reason this city shouldn't be clean, essentially free of homeless (and sometimes insane) people, have great public roads, excellent public transportation, low crime, worry about more interesting things than what size diamond ring Kanye bought for his lady, and so forth.
There is a good data driven TED talk on how points like the above correlate with wealth and equality: http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
Also, SF is considered "progressive" for many of its completely unsustainable policies, like housing controls, which ultimately lead to further economic inefficiency. A truly progressive society is more like Toronto where the poor can generally get help, but we don't mind putting up condos or new office space.
Also the Swedes do some things that are much more right wing than America, like Free Schools (essentially private schools operating with a government payment, similar to the coupon model). It isn't a left-right difference. Furthermore, Sweden has cut services and taxes more than any other western country in the past decade.
Also you can't really compare it anyway. There is a far higher amount of cultural homogeneity in Sweden than the US, even in the white portion of the US, and the average IQ is 3 or 4 points higher.
As for homelessness, you are living in SF. This is what you get. The US has a much higher veteran rate than Sweden which highly correlates to homelessness (usually due to PTSD and associated drug abuse) and the capital of homelessness in North America is SF.
I think he means that there are 10 cans for the entire condo complex.
Also, forcing individual _taxpayers_ to sort trash really keeps environmentalism in the forefront of voters' minds, which I imagine makes it much easier to keep environment-friendly legislation and public works projects going.
Consider the opposite extreme, having a single bin that absolutely everything goes in. It would be easy to just completely forget about whatever it is you're throwing away and never think about what ultimate fate each piece is destined for.
It would sure keep it in the forefront of my mind, but not in the way I think you'd like! More: "How can I get rid of the politicians who force me into this menial waste of time?"
I will happily pay in taxes whatever the added processing costs are for allowing me to continue to use Cambridge's terrific "single stream" system, which allows for an astonishing range of waste in a single bin. It doesn't cover the hazardous stuff like batteries and CFLs, but you can make that easier, too, without requiring individuals to maintain bins for 5 different varieties of plastic.
I think in Paris (?) they have some underground storage for recycling on street corners. Someone was telling me about that when I was there.
In New Zealand (and some other places), garbage is put out in plastic bags - only official bags are picked up - and you pay per bag used.
Incentives to minimise hard-to-recycle waste could be a good thing.
Where I live in California, we are given a large recyclables bin and a small trash bin, with the option to pay more for a larger trash bin. This sounds like an incentive to recycle, but it's a perverse one. If I were to just put all my trash in the recycle bin, there would be no consequences at all for me, because the recyclables truck just dumps it all into a big communal heap, with no possibility to trace it back to me. Is this cardboard too wet to recycle? Who knows? In it goes!
No it doesn't. I live in so-called 'progressive' Holland where separate waste collection has been done for years. It's not efficient now any more (in 2013 we have better waste separation methods as was had in the 1990's) but people have become conditioned to 'separating waste = green' that it's hard to reverse now. Plus, the whole infrastructure exists now anyway, so the switching costs would take another decade to make back - an investment for which there is simply no room in these times.
It's an interesting question, and very difficult to answer. Like climate studies, you'd need to calculate so many side effects, that your answer might be different depending on the context you take into account. I've discussed this topic quite extensively with colleagues in urban planning and environmental sciences in countries across the world, but nobody knows (obviously) and people's preferences tend to align with what they have or have worked on. Personally I tend towards the automated / technology solutions (i.e., centralized), but I can't tell if that's because of a cognitive bias or from an increased ability in estimating these sort of things from experience, so that basically nullifies my opinion, too.
It's water under the bridge anyway.
A different approach would be to charge people for trash pickup. If the cost for sorted trash removal is enough of a savings, then people will do it.
Actually, the Swedes really do believe in this. Everyone I know conscientiously sorts their trash.
A Swede will happy carry their own bags up to their rooms in hotels, too. Most hotels don't have porters. They don't have the whole tipping thing either generally. You go through life doing things for yourself, not paying others to do things for you.
Maybe its the US psyche and is some kind of superiority complex? I'm half-serious; why do people on your side of the pond think its a hassle to sort their trash?
Whenever I'm offered these services I feel annoyed - what do I look like, a giant baby? I can carry my own bag.
The larger the wealth gap is in society, the more people become obsessed with comparing themselves to others and the more patterns we see designed to enable them to feel they come out on top in this comparison.
As far as I have ever seen, most people don't mind sorting the trash, the different bins just aren't there.
In places where there is a single recycling can, I can't remember anyone throwing recycling into the trash can, with righteous indignation, muttering about the extra cost to their personal time.
Too bad they're wrong though. Talk about 'Stockholm syndrome' (get it? I'm so funny)
In the case of the Vietnam war, the awareness clearly lead to - how should I put it - an extreme absence of fondness, as it should have.
Go blame Ho Chi Minh as well for the war that shouldn't have happened. Of course by doing that, you'll likely be kicked out of the organic food co-op.
I prefer that we kept all politics off Hacker News. Nobody cares about my (or your) political views unless they pertain to something extremely relevant to the tech and startup communities.
also for wanting to keep politics off HN - you failed pretty badly at that mate!
Indeed. I always get a bit surprised when I see visiting people throwing cans out of the car window, or a plastic wrapper while walking down the street. I guess its a wonder that they only regard the street as a garbage can and not as a toilet.
When I was in certain large, developed cities in China (nearly 15 years ago now) most of the toddlers I saw in public had "open bottom" outfits on; they literally used the street as a toilet. Some parents would hold them over the bin when they needed to go. Many wouldn't.
Your point is valid; when you "abstract" away recycling to a centralized plant, the individual most likely won't consider the environmental impact of his purchasing decisions and habits nearly as much.
It is true that Sweden has cut services a lot in the last few years and the "right wing" coalition had unprecedented voter support in the last election. There's a massive backlash against them, and I'll be shocked if the ruling coalition or party doesn't swing massively left next year - as will most Swedes.
Regarding vets: yes I'm sure that if you send somebody to the hell that is war, and doesn't take care of him when he comes back, that this will increase his chances of ending up in the streets vs the average civilian. I'm not sure what your point is. Maybe we should reallocate some of the wealth to taking better care of these people, and enter into fewer wars?
In the UK, the right-wing Education Minister, Michael Gove, is a particularly enthusiastic proponent of "free schoools" and has been strongly influenced by the Swedish free school model. In fact, the 2010 Conservative election manifesto even included a page praising the Swedish free school policy.
Edit: Spello
That's overly pessimistic.
Compared to most of the world, the fact that the size of your wallet doesn't directly determine which schools we can go to is remarkable.
What is the academic merits to become a teacher today? Zero?
Edit: Added extra paragraph.
Sure. I didn't arrive at this through reasoning, it's a contingency. I hope I didn't leave anything non-obvious out:
* In most places, you have to afford the school and you need the grades/SAT scores (academic merit).
* In Sweden, you don't need to afford the school: you only need the grades/SAT scores (academic merit).
And that we granted every small education institution with the status of university.
So to sum up: the goal of "free" education is to make higher education available for more people. This will lead to lowering of standards of already existing programs because more will attend (normal distribution of skill) and in the universities self interest a majority will pass because universities is paid per graduated student.
And with a gradual lowering of standards this opens up for unqualified students to attend, especially in combination with government programs.
Ergo academic merits does not matter.
In Swedish Almost anyone can be a teacher http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/nastan-vem-som-helst-kan-bl...
This is now norm on many programs at the Swedish universities.
This link shows statistics for people accepted into higher education for this fall semester: http://statistik.vhs.se
Both in the design of the system and in its actual results, it's clear that academic merit matters more than any other factor.
Politicized is the one that accepts the reality of politics, I don't because I look at result not intent.
What is more, the notion that homogeneity and IQ have anything to do with the capacity of a nation to recycle is both offensive and absurd.
If you get an ethnic Swede drunk and ask him about third world immigration and its effect on his nation, be prepared for an eye opener!
And I'm fed up with stupid racists that think that they just say what everyone really thinks. You don't represent us. We think you are stupid and ignorant.
I do think the northern European schooling/education model makes a lot more sense, and could be a solution for a lot of the societal problems at the root. However, the cultural diversity of SF makes that a much more complex problem than it is in Sweden/Finland. And so we come full circle, this stuff is just not that easy as "look it works over there, we should do it too"
While it's probably true that SF has more homeless due to migration, I don't think it's the root cause. You really have to look at the societal structure, government support and so on for the causes.
I don't think this is terrible, but it has costs associated with it that will become apparent further down the road -- similar to how the existing education system born from the industrial revolution's needs has proven to. The system you have suggested has a prominent lack of means to introduce people to advanced theoretical physics, economics research, astronomy, abstract mathematics, etc, you get the picture. A generation without a hint of knowledge in the non-practical fields will function fine in the short-term, but it will lead to a stagnation of advancement until an external trigger brings it back about.
Essentially, as I'm guessing you're a hacker-hustler-type, you see the primary course of education to promote passion in "doing," and that's my first instinctual priority for education as well. But classically, education has had a role to do much more than just that (albeit extremely inefficiently) for many generations, and it could be detrimental to focus on only one educational priority of "learn to do things well", with a potential to lose being able to gain exposure to other kinds of intellectual commitments. Maybe it won't happen, but it's a real risk. Who knows what we may have lost already from generations past?
Of course, everyone in the world agrees that the "sitting behind desks competing on test scores forgetting all the knowledge and then stumbling through relearning the real world from scratch" model of today's education is broken and pretty stupid, but it's not that straightforward to fix, unfortunately. Your suggestion is definitely something a single school could adopt (and broad institutionalized educational requirements should be abolished), and I would love to send my future kids there over anything that exists today.
They still have some of the highest taxes in the world and an extensive welfare state.
The US may be collecting less taxes, but if they're just putting the remainder on credit, then they aren't really any further ahead (and possibly behind).
I did a quick search, but didn't come up with anything.
(I understand what little evidence we have points to maternal health/diet/wellbeing as the single biggest causal factor. Handouts of food - or simply money - to mothers in the latter part of pregnancy are the most effective intervention we know. But again, we know very little and it's very difficult to find anyone who can study these effects from a position of neutrality)
I don't understand how you can make this claim when it has so obviously worked to great success for Sweden. The evidence shows that they are the best at managing their trash; why shouldn't we learn from them?
It's actually much more efficient. Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial.
I would love to have 10 cans and help the environment. Something like this:
Glass, plastic, paper, metal, bio/food, electronics, rubber, textiles, everything else.
Right now most of that stuff gets mixed and gets piled up polluting ground water.
Collecting 10 cans is not really trivial. And even with 10 different cans, the result still needs to be further sorted (there are 20 or 30 types of recyclable plastic alone). Glass needs to be sorted into 4-5 different colors. Paper needs to be sorted into 4-5 different qualities.
Industrial waste sorting certainly is expensive -- due to capital expenditure, not ongoing costs -- but it's needed in every recycling solution. The problem with expecting the public to sort, is that humans are less good at sorting than (well-designed) machines and relying on humans sorting reducing the percentage of recyclable material that is actually recycled.
There are serious arguments that all general waste should be machine sorted since it's the only way to maintain maximum levels of recycling.
They actually have machines for that. There's a youtube video on how they sort types of plastic.
> Glass needs to be sorted into 4-5 different colors
Sorting by color is trivial to automate.
> Paper needs to be sorted into 4-5 different qualities.
Yes. However where I live you have to separate cardboard from everything else. Most other paper gets shredded into pulp and recycled.
Nope. 10 years ago it was like that, not any more. Sorting technology has gotten much better. Here is the thing: you need to sort anyway, even if you collect waste separately, because you can't rely on everybody being 100% correct in putting stuff in the right container. So 2 decades ago when people started collecting separately, the sorting stations were partly automated and could only process relatively small amounts of 'pollution' (e.g. cans in heaps of paper), and the rest was done manually. Nowadays machines can handle much more capacity, and the overhead of collecting things separately has become higher than the costs of processing everything from a big heap of mixed materials.
For a long time we used to have general waste and compostables. That was quite understandable because you really want the compostables into a separate heap because of...well, composting and you can produce bio gas off composts if the percentage of decomposing waste is high enough. But I'm pretty sure the separation of glass, wood, papers, cardboards etc. could be done in some automated way that reaches a good enough success rate that would make it economically and ecologically viable.
It has also been tried many times to separate organic matter from the rest (different colour of bags), and using automatic systems to sort it. It has been mostly dropped because it's more expensive than just burning everything unfortunately. Which brings me to the main point. We can be very efficient and recycle most of the waste, find a optimum point where we minimize the environmental footprint - it's just expensive, and the first thing to go when the city need to save money. People just don't care about future generations, or don't believe it's a problem, to accept the cost of recycling.
But it really is a shame, because high density areas like Copenhagen, are ideal for pushing recycling. You get quantities, and you don't have to collect over a large geographical area. So the running cost of collecting is significantly less, and you can build larger and more efficient facilities to process and recycle the waste.
I feel it's worth mentioning that other cities and even other states have long had an unofficial policy of sending their homeless/crazy people to places like SF. This has now become the subject of lawsuits - see for example http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/12/first-lawsuit-fil...
As a fellow Euro, I agree with your overall argument, however.
Nope, you can burn unsorted garbage. The reason for sorting is so you can recycle materials instead of putting it in a incinerator.
I'll be impressed if it can keep social cohesion while allowing immigrants to make a better life for themselves. It's easy for an elite society to stay closed and elite. SF is open to some of the poorest people on earth.
What is the racial/ethnic diversity of Sweden? Showing stats on high immigration where the top of list is finnland, germany, denmark, etc. It's great sweden takes refugee's, but that is easy if they are a tiny fraction of the population. What percentage of the population is a different race or ethnicity? Here is san fransisco http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html
For some hard numbers, "15% of the [Swedish] population was born abroad, 5% of the population was born in Sweden to two parents born abroad, and another 7% was born in Sweden to one parent born abroad. Resulting in 27% of the Swedish population being of at least partly foreign descent." (Wikipedia for Immigration_to_Sweden#Current_population_of_immigrants_and_their_descendants . That also shows the complete breakdown, with Iraq, Bosnia, former Yugoslavia, and Iran in positions #2-5, after Finland.)
Compare that to the US: "According to the Census Bureau's 2009 American Community Survey, the US immigrant population was 38,517,234, or 12.5 percent of the total US population." (http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=8... )
12.5% for the US is less than 15% for Sweden.
It's hard to compare the Swedish immigration numbers to the ones in the link you gave, which talks about ethnicity in San Francisco, because the Swedish government tracks nationality, not ethnicity.
It's also difficult to compare San Francisco, which has a higher than average diversity in the US, with all of Sweden. For example, in Botkyrka Municipality near Stockholm nearly half the population has at least one parent born in another country, and that rises to 65% in one of its neighborhoods; a neighborhood where 26% of the neighborhood is a foreign national.
By comparison, that number is 30% (instead of 26%) for the SF Bay Area. However, even then it's not a good comparison because I picked a single neighborhood of 82k people in Sweden, against the Bay Area, which has a population of 7.15 million. The entirety of Sweden is only 9.5 million people.
So yes, you can easily say that San Francisco is a very culturally diverse city. No one disagrees with you.
However, purplelobster's point was that Sweden currently, and over the last two decades, takes in a lot of refugees on a per-capita basis, and even more than the US does - a fact which is not in dispute.
My point was if Stockholm had the same weather and immigration policies as San Fransisco, it would be facing some of the same challenges with poverty and homelessness.
I currently live in a city that doesn't collect trash separately and I still separate my trash - it's just nicer and cleaner.
The marketing budget needed to convince people to transition to the new model will pay itself off shortly. Consider also that you'll get unpaid "split-trash evangelists" in most neighbourhoods doing your work for you.
My parents do this and it's not like it's very onerous.
I guess you could implement a system for that too. Inform the city when you have less common items to throw away and when the quota for your neighborhood is full, a truck gets dispatched to pick it up. Would require some extra infrastructure I guess, but it might be worth it.
They take furniture, appliances and green waste (from gardens and such).
Furthermore, the kinds of things we recycle from day to day do not consist of more than 6 categories. Two colors of glass, metal (cans mostly), cartons, paper, plastic. Everyone I know collects this in their own home in paper bags, and then leaves them at a collection point close to their house when they get full. And of course, we don't normally take an extra trip to do this. I leave it on my way to the subway, other people might leave them when they take the car to work. It's really not much of an extra workload. I'm guessing I spend 15 minutes a month on my recycling.
Then we have more rare trash. Electronics, batteries, light bulbs, wood, paint etc. For the suburbs and small towns they have larger recycling plants in each municipality which you can drive to. They have shipping containers where you dump your old bikes, tv's, your large pine tree that you cut down to get some more sun in your yard, etc. A typical family might visit this place one to three times a year to dump some more hazardous or clunky trash.
If you live in an apartment complex (and possibly don't have access to a car) there's usually a room in the complex for all of these things. They have the plastic, glass, metal, batteries and electronics containers close to your own apartment.
For me who live in the city and don't have access to a car, there is actually a truck that comes around a few times a year for me to deposit these things. It has a few collection points close to me (within walking distance) and sends out a text message to my phone a few weeks before they're coming, besides having a schedule online.
Having been raised in this type of a recycling system, I'm always amazed by people, even in Sweden, who think it's too cumbersome. Sure, it happens that I forget to empty my recycling bins at the collection points some times, and then I do throw cartons and cans in my regular garbage (which from what I know is not illegal, btw). But in general there really isn't any noticeable overhead.
Not only do they dislike that on principal, if people start to like any one particular intervention (which many people do with recycling) then it undermines their entire political approach.
I really think the fact that Sweden is 30 time smaller than the US is a significant aspect of the problem, which ought to be highlighted a bit more when doing a comparison between these two countries on their energy models.
How hard would it be for the US to implement such solution (assuming the cost would not be as prohibitive as it is compared with nuclear energy), first in a large city like NY (or LA) as a test bed? Maybe something like that already exist in the States?
Or look up Lancaster, PA (one county over from Harrisburg) and how their trash->energy plant "is considered a national model for waste disposal, featured in industry trade publications."[1], and how they (Lancaster county) are in the process of buying the Harrisburg facility.[2]
[1] http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/08/tale_of_t... [2] http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/856655_County-waste...
What marks this as a puff piece is the lack of honesty around CO2. The only place they mention it is in comparing it to.. generating the same amount of power from burning oil. It is spun as a way to reduce CO2, because look at all the oil we aren't burning. But this is a disingenuous comparison.
A proper comparison would pit burning trash against renewable energy sources that don't produce greenhouse gases. Nowhere do they even let on that incinerating trash is anything but a total positive for the environment.
There are other signals that this is a PR piece. They note that they've reduced "emissions" by 90-99 percent. Sounds like a miracle. But if you look closely and read all the details.. they don't count CO2 as an "emission".
Source (that the article is based on): http://www.avfallsverige.se/fileadmin/uploads/forbranning_en...
Not really, because carbon neutral renewable energy usable for heating are not plentiful. AFAIK there is only: Sustainable wood pelet burning with particles filters, Heat pumps.
And there is contestations about heat pumps being a green energy source http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/sep/08/heat-pump...
Of course it's a proper comparison. Even if heat pumps have drawbacks, so does burning trash. You compare the two.
Definitely! Landfill takes up a lot of space. Yes, it's buried underground, but there is a risk that harmful toxins or chemicals can leak into the soil. Landfill gases can leak into the air. A lot of that rubbish will not decompose.
The UK has a landfill tax to discourage excess waste, but unlike Sweden and Norway, we have not come up with clever, forward-thinking solutions to tackle the problem.
A number from oil tankers: the "freight cost" of shipping a supertanker's worth of oil halfway around the world works out to a few pennies per gallon -- 1% of the net cost, and an even smaller fraction of the energy content.
Oslo, a recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn.
So it seems so, yeah :-(
From Naturvårdsverket (Swedish Environmental Protection Agency)
In Swedish http://www.naturvardsverket.se/Stod-i-miljoarbetet/Vaglednin...
Google translate http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=...
much higher temperatures
The amount of polluted nitrogen oxides to the level of produced energy unit has dropped some the last few years, but not much.
The general nitrogen oxide levels in Sweden has been reduced since the 90s according to this source
In Swedish http://www.miljomal.se/Miljomalen/Alla-indikatorer/Indikator...
"Från 1990 till 2011 har utsläppen minskat från cirka 270 000 ton till cirka 145 500 ton. Det är en minskning på 46 procent."
"From 1990 to 2011, emissions have been reduced from about 270 000 tonnes to around 145 500 tonnes. This is a decrease of 46 percent."
Google translate http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=...
The source is from Miljömål (Environment Goal),site runned by Swedish Environmental Protection Agency
Most also do cogeneration as well (energy + heat/steam distribution).
I agree, it is a better article. But the OP is about Sweden, and reads as a poorly executed "Us too" press release. Your article is about a similar (but slightly different) problem in Norway. Hence my down vote.
Plastics and such do represent fossilized carbon (usually) but are a smaller percentage overall.
So the net carbon impact is much lower than burning fossil fuels. And yes, the methane reduction helps, though methane does have a pretty short (about a decade) residency in the atmosphere as I understand.
But if you don't actually have enough garbage to run the facility, then it is that much less cost-efficient. It implies that something has gone badly wrong. Why did you build so many facilities?
http://www.keppelseghers.com/en/content.aspx?sid=3028
It's possible that that's drastically different than the Swedish ones, but I fundamentally do not believe that any power generation facility is a terribly cheap facility to build or maintain. If you do, I suggest that that is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
I have no idea what the net environmental benefit is (or if it even is positive (or if anyone really knows)).
"Unlike incinerators and other thermal processes, the BOS™ does not use a high temperature, turbulent processes to reduce the waste. The “quiet”, non‐turbulent smouldering of waste during the gasification phase means that the production of fly‐ash is almost eliminated, and the process does not suffer from temperature peaks and troughs, thus reducing problems with the formation of NOx and dioxins. However, many waste materials contain chemical components which can cause problems in any thermal process. Acid gases and metals must be neutralised and or / removed, and dioxins, furans, and particulates must all be reduced to minute amounts in order to meet the stringent EU legislation and compliance requirements. BOS™ achieves this by the use of a comprehensive Flue Gas Treatment (FGT) system through a dedicated Best Available Technology (BAT) program. The injection of sodium bicarbonate and activated carbon in a powdered form neutralises the acid gases and absorbs heavy metals and dioxins. Urea, injected into the Secondary Combustion Chamber, reduces NOx levels dramatically, and a bag-house filter system removes any last traces of particulate before the exhaust goes to atmosphere."
[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/business/energy-environmen...
[2]http://wtecanada.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/WtEC-BOS-Web...
It amounts to "we're not provably worse than any of the other technologies that have been adopted"... aka it's far from the best available, which I'm sure is cost prohibitive.
That aside, I do have a lot of respect for the work that goes into this sort of chemical engineering - absolutely fascinating stuff.
http://www.sysav.se/upload/flash/sysav.swf
There's an extensive pollution collection/scrubbing system that captures the pollutants as solids and liquids.
I recently saw this documentary which discusses various approaches to managing trash: http://www.trashedfilm.com/references.php#tabair
Obviously, I'd like to see that end. There are many more productive things humans can do that are far less of a risk to their health.
But imagine robots that are able to do it, either at the source or before the garbage is burned or buried or shipped off elsewhere.
A lot of work still remains before that happens, but one day robots will be carefully examining each item discarded and sending it to the most appropriate place.
Because this is wonderful!
On the positive side: many sources will pay you to take their trash from them. There's nothing like free energy.
On the negative side:
- Sweden's exhaustion of its own sources of trash show that the concept is inherently limited, even in an abundant consumption economy. That is, one which is producing ample waste streams. As the article notes: "the fastidious population of Northern Europe produces only about 150 million tons of waste a year, he said, far too little to supply incinerating plants that can handle more than 700 million tons." That's a kind way of saying that Sweden's overbuilt its trash-to-electric capacity by 467%.
- Some trash is more equal than others. Countries such as Switzerland and Germany which offer highly segregated waste streams find themselves with many takers. Italy, who is stereotypically ... less organized, not so much. Again, noted in the article.
- There are issues with contaminants, which require monitoring of the input waste stream, the combustion process, and emissions controls.
- Ultimately there's the question of how much trash will exist in a world with a leaner energy profile. In which case it's likely we'll find that there's a very high excess of trash-to-energy infrastructure, though much of it might be applied to other feedstocks, including biomass. Though this also has its limits:
http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange...
Putting this in an American context (likely familiar to most readers):
Americans produce 230 million tons of waste stream, about 4.3 - 4.6 pounds per person per day.
http://www.learner.org/interactives/garbage/solidwaste.html
http://www.epa.gov/osw/basic-solid.htm
In a best-case scenario, this would be pure biomass. I'll assume the same energy potential as carbohydrate (oil-based products will have roughly double this, glass, metal, and inorganic solids less), at 4 calories/gram, or roughly 971 GWh of electrical energy. That's an appreciable amount of energy, but given that annual electrical production is 4.1 tera watt-hours, my hypothetical puts waste-stream energy production at less than 1/4 of electrical energy usage, or roughly 6% of total energy usage. And that's before considering the energy requirements of collecting and processing the wastestream itself, or the effects on waste production in a reduced-energy environment.
If, as you say, 971 GWh is equivalent to 6% of total energy usage, then 980 TWh is 6000% total energy usage. Of course, you don't get 100% efficiency in incineration, but an oversupply of 60x leaves a lot of room for inefficiency.
Here's my calculation. I've used scientific notation to reduce the possibility of order-of-magnitude errors:
> 230 million tons Avoirdupois = 2.3e8 tons
> 2.3e8 tons * 2e3 pounds/ton = 4.6e11 pounds
> 4.6e11 pounds * 0.45 kg/pound = 2.07e11 kg
> 2.07e11 kg * 1000 g/kg = 2.07e14 g
> 2.07e14 g * 17 kJ/g for carbohydrates = 3.52e15 kJ
> 3.52e15 kJ * 2.78e-4 kWh/kJ = 9.8e11 kWh
That's 980 billion kWh, or 980 million MWh, or 980 thousand GWh, or 980 TWh.
I wonder if maybe you're getting nutrition Calories (uppercase) confused with gram calories (lowercase). Nutrition Calories are actually kilocalories!!! If you forgot to multiply by 1000 to account for this, then that would explain your result.
In Europe, nutrition labels are listed in kilojoules. This eliminates the confusion over calories.
Keep in mind that you're also limited by heat-engine efficiencies. I need to double-check if steam turbines are governed by Carnot cycle (35% max efficiency) or others, but that's another factor to keep in mind.
And yes, the calorie/kilocalorie distinction is important ;-)
Three orders of magnitude makes a world of difference.
And I'm confirming your numbers, FWIW, which makes me suspect there's something wrong with my assumptions. I'll see if I can't dig up other references on waste-to-energy estimates.
So it still serves a useful purpose. It's just not going to solve our energy issues.
And for some countries,say, India, which has tremendous issues with trash and a severe energy shortage, this might be useful. If the logistics, pollution, and wastestream segregation issues can be worked out.
Also only 54% is currently sent to a landfill, so that would reduce your energy return to 524 GWh. That's about 20 years worth of new power plants coming online. (It appears most years the US adds about 20-25 GWh in power generation capacity a year)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/ikea-burritos-and-...
Transport by sea requires negligible amount of energy. Local transport will likely waste more energy than the transport between two countries.
Seriously, that's why it's shipped rather than burned locally. Some people don't want these plants around them no matter what the benefit.
http://www.epa.gov/region07/air/title5/petitiondb/petitions/...
0. NYC, like many big cities, creates a ton of trash (excluding writers and actors).
1. I didn't see anything about CO2/CO/COx emissions. Landfills are semi-sequestration. Burning is definitely not sequestration. It doesn't seem scalable. See also: http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_green_why_we_should_build_wooden_skyscrapers.html