Author Topic: waste to energy  (Read 4204 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

aypz

  • Guest
waste to energy
« on: July 09, 2010, 05:03:07 AM »
1.   What are your views on plasma gasification? From what I understand the capital costs are much higher than what they are reported to be, with the result that it is not economical to use these for waste to energy conversions…

2.   One of the biggest problems urban centers from all over the world are going to face is the landfills. At the rate at which landfills are swelling, cities will have to soon find out a productive method of disposing these. Unfortunately, most of these waste are not organic in nature, at least not purely organic, which means some of the methods like anaerobic digestion might not be the best way…what is the best method to convert these landfills to energy? Incineration?




http://www.fieldlines.com/board/

TomW

  • Super Hero Member Plus
  • *******
  • Posts: 5130
  • Country: us
Re: waste to energy
« Reply #1 on: July 09, 2010, 10:32:27 AM »
How about we stop packaging everything in plastics, and stop tossing stuff to begin with?

Household of 2 here and our total landfill waste would not fill a 55 gallon barrel in a year.

Reclaiming from senseless waste still seems senseless.

Just an opinion.

Tom

dnix71

  • SuperHero Member
  • ******
  • Posts: 2513
Re: waste to energy
« Reply #2 on: July 09, 2010, 08:49:32 PM »
Here is south Florida we ran out of space a long long time ago and have been burning trash ever since. Metal is recovered on the front end and the clinkers are landfilled.
It's not fancy plasma burning, they just shove it in a big brick-lined oven.

Not much electricity is made that way. The plant at SR84 in Davie peaks at less than 70MW. The clinkers were supposed to be used as base for road construction, but I suspect they have heavy metal or some other content that makes then unsuitable for that. Fuel costs to transport waste is usually the real limiting factor.

If we just ran out of oil one day it would solve a lot of environmental problems. No oil = no fancy packaging.

People could compost their lawn waste at home in most cases if they just didn't fertilize and water so much. I don't have any lawn waste to haul away anymore. I use the canal slope on the inside of the fence as a compost area. There are a lot fewer trees here than there used to be, too. Hurricanes, deliberate destruction in a failed attempt to contain citrus canker, ficus (Asian) whitefly, and non-native vegetarian iguanas that eat pretty much anything green.

Old F

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 309
Re: waste to energy
« Reply #3 on: July 09, 2010, 09:05:54 PM »
1.   What are your views on plasma gasification? From what I understand the capital costs are much higher than what they are reported to be, with the result that it is not economical to use these for waste to energy conversions…

2.   One of the biggest problems urban centers from all over the world are going to face is the landfills. At the rate at which landfills are swelling, cities will have to soon find out a productive method of disposing these. Unfortunately, most of these waste are not organic in nature, at least not purely organic, which means some of the methods like anaerobic digestion might not be the best way…what is the best method to convert these landfills to energy? Incineration?




http://www.fieldlines.com/board/







Can you point me to were your found that the capital costs are much higher than what they are reported ?

Having so much fun it should be illegal

electrondady1

  • SuperHero Member
  • ******
  • Posts: 3120
  • Country: ca
Re: waste to energy
« Reply #4 on: July 10, 2010, 09:24:34 AM »
i got involved with a protest movement last year, up here in Simcoe county Ontario.
stop dump site 41.
it was a twenty year battle to stop them building a dump over the Aliston aquifer.
it's been a lesson on corruption in municipal politics.
there is big big money in garbage.
collection, haulage, and tippage fees  and dump site construction make it a cash cow.
and there is great resistance to any thing that interferes with the money flow.
the county sent the cops to arrest the protesters.(some of them in their 80's)

that gave the county such a black eye in the media they hired a big time public relations firm to clean up their image.(@ $250,000.00 )
they stopped construction, and hired a consultant firm(@$200,000.00)
to figure out what to do with the garbage.
the consulting firm took about five months to come up with the  idea that every thing is fine just the way it is.

around here we separate organic stuff for compost, a green box
paper and cardboard is separated for recycling.the grey box
metal and plastic they have a market for goes in the blue box.
that leaves the old green bag full of plastic packaging  and headed for the land fill.

a couple of things i found out. in the process.
8% of oil and gas production goes to the plastics industry.
they don't care if we bury the stuff or burn it.
 just don't reuse it.
 as that interferes with the sale of new materials.
the unsorted plastic in the green bags can be ground up into 2mm bits and added to asphalt
up to 20% of volume.
it makes a longer lasting,smoother road.
but of course that takes a bite out of aggregate sales and those guys don't like the loss.

gasification, incineration, turns something bad (garbage) into something poisonous(dioxin)
















ruddycrazy

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 517
Re: waste to energy
« Reply #5 on: July 13, 2010, 05:54:44 AM »
Over here in Oz in the Adelaide hills we have the most loopy council in the state and one of the highest in the country. When we bought the farm there was no weekly collection for the first 3 years and we got 20 tickets to dump our rubbish at the local dump which was 40 K's away. Each ticket was worth 3 off 100 litre garbage bags ( but the garbage bags only come in 75 litre). I rocked up one day with 12 of those 75 litre bags on the back of my ute and the attendant said 5 tickets to dump, I gave him 3 and told him go back to school to learn to count. He started blasting I decide how many tickets must be used and my reply was open the gate or my bullbar on my ute will. I did endup only paying 3 tickets that day.

Then we found out we could use a contractor for weekly rubbish collection so we bought a bin ( a decent sized one) and that worked a treat for 3 years. The council decided they should do the rubbish so they doubled the price and made the bins 1/2 the size. Now general rubbish is weekly but the recycling bin is fortnightly and atleast once a month they forget to come around.

My solution I just dug a decent hole and the extra rubbish goes in along with a good dose of fox poison, when the bottom of the hole is filled I dose up a few peices of meat with the fox bait and throw a couple of buckets of dirt on. The fox's always dug those baits out for awhile now theres no fox's left. Once the hole is past it's useby date I fill it back to ground level and go dig a new hole, the old hole gets a couple of trees planted on it and seem to thrive.

The money I have saved on supposedly droping my rubbish off to the dump where they are supposed to recycle  is heaps and it is well known the council just digs their own hole to dispose of the rubbish anyway.

The way I see it it one has the land to do this it is a good way to get rid of rubbish and by the way any plastics go on the back of my work ute and into the work bin every week.

Cheers Bryan

Note: My solution for waste to energy those trees planted thrive and in a few years they will be firewood so there's waste to energy in one hit.....

joestue

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1759
  • Country: 00
Re: waste to energy
« Reply #6 on: July 13, 2010, 12:17:18 PM »
my beef with the issue is there are plenty of places that don't even recycle.

Specifically with electronic waste, it is economical to mine it for copper, gold, silver, lead, antimony, silicon, aluminum etc using traditional metal extraction techniques. the waste is plastic, burn it and sell the HCL that ends up in the scrubber. Or, don't bother collecting the metals, just turn it all into glass. 5 cents/ pound will pay for the energy required. let our kids develop ways to cost effectively remove the metals from said glass, by that time the copper mines will be down to 1% ore anyway.

Plasma gassification isn't cost effective because there isn't any energy in the trash to be had. you have to add heat to get it to burn above 400-500 degrees, about where cardboard burns at. (why are we putting cardboard out with the general refuse rather than recycling it in the first place?
Plastics don't really burn because we mandated PEBD's or whatever the acronym is. Yet the levels aren't even high enough to cost effectively collect the Bromine, even when the trash is entirely pink foam.
etc, etc.
 plasma is just a way of making it smaller. (so would compacting it down at 9000 PSI, (would probably be cheaper to...)
My wife says I'm not just a different colored rubik's cube, i am a rubik's knot in a cage.