FROM WASTE TO ENERGY

Sweden sends just 1% of its residential solid waste to the landfill, recycling 50% and thermally processing 49% for heat and power generation in their WTE plants (waste to energy).

Planet Earth Weekly

By Lin Smith

August 11, 2013–Sweden, a country of 9 million people, is one of our planet’s leaders in creating a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Their goal is to achieve a completely oil free economy by 2020, replacing fossil fuels with renewable alternatives before “climate change undermines national economies worldwide and diminishing oil supplies force astronomical price increases.” Their renewable alternative–turning trash into power! Although at the present time Sweden relies on other forms of energy, burning of garbage accounts for an equivalent of 810,000 homes being heated and the electrical equivalent of 250,000 homes being powered. The waste to energy plants are burning garbage faster than Swedes can produce it, so their solution? Import garbage from Norway!

Sweden sends just 1% of its residential solid waste to the landfill, recycling 50% and thermally processing 49% for heat and power generation in their WTE plants…

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Biogas generator

The process begins with the segregation of the waste to ensure the waste that is used in completely biodegradable (fragments of plastics and glass are sent to a dumping ground). Once segregated the waste is put into a liquefier.

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To find out if waste to energy plans are already used in Mumbai, we got in touch with an engineer from the solid waste management of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM). He told us that in Deonar (an area with a notoriously large dumping ground) a biogas generator had recently begun to convert biodegradable waste to energy for a local hospital. Although it isn’t directly related to our project, by going to the site we got an idea as to how much electricity can be generated from biodegradable waste.

The process begins with the segregation of the waste to ensure the waste that is used in completely biodegradable (fragments of plastics and glass are sent to a dumping ground). Once segregated the waste is put into a liquefier. Check this out in this video:

After being liquified the waste is put into a chamber with microbes that process…

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Cities Worldwide Seek to Produce Recycled Energy

Public transportation like subway or buses in Sweden’s Hammarby sjostad city are running by 100 percent recycled energy. Hammarby sjostad is known as “the city with zero carbon emission.” It is easy to spot people putting bio-gas in their vehicles at every gas stations in Hammarby sjostad city.

Waste-to-Energy in a Dairy Farm

The farm is now turning the extra manure into fuel for its delivery trucks, powering 42 tractor-trailers that make daily runs to raw milk processing plants in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Eat your leftovers

Rather than sitting in a landfill, organic wastes such as food leftovers are put into anaerobic digesters that produce biogas rich in methane. This biogas can be used as fuel for heat and power generation, and the stuff that’s leftover can be used as composting material.

Energy, Technology, & Policy

Americans throw away about 30% of all food produced domestically each year, and since at least 8% of the U.S. energy budget goes towards bringing food to tables across the country, energy waste is closely tied to food waste [1]. In fact, all of that wasted food equates to about 350 million barrels of oil per year [1].

The energy embedded in food waste comes from many sectors of the food industry: production, transportation, storage, and preparation. Since food waste is a cultural problem, it is not likely that it will stop any time soon. A better solution to waste prevention could be to take advantage of the energy potential of food in our landfills. Rather than sitting in a landfill, organic wastes such as food leftovers are put into anaerobic digesters that produce biogas rich in methane [2]. This biogas can be used as fuel for heat and power…

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Environment and the Plasma Gasification of Garbage

The Discordant

I wanted to bring to your attention a very interesting article that I read on the New York Times. The link is: Garbage Plasma Gasification.

It was a while ago when I read it, but didn’t have time to write about it! So here it is:

The first thing I saw was the word “Garbage”… I didn’t really give much attention to it because even though it is something really important, and that people should be aware of, I already know what most articles usually say about it. Things like: “Oh, the toxins from incinerating the garbage are bad”, “We have to start disposing of medical/toxic garbage in safe places”, “Soon there will be a shortage of places where to dump garbage and it will have to be thrown into space” or “Everyone should recycle because it will help the world by producing less waste and save money”.  These are all…

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Campania: The land of smoke and fire

In the Shadow of Vesuvius

Garbage and Campania have a long sordid history together. With over 5.8 million people living in the region it shouldn’t be surprising that they have trouble disposing of their waste. Naples is the largest city in Campania but the smallest province. With a population of 3,175,010 people and a population density of 2,625.9 people/sq. km it probably has the most difficulty with ridding itself of trash but also manages to keep the streets relatively clean* considering. In 2007-2008 the problem reached its peak when municipal workers went on strike and refused to transport anymore trash. The garbage piles were higher than the roof of a car and several times as long. They could be found all over the city and surrounding countryside. Since that time the government has worked on solutions to attempt to rein in the overflow.

In Campania the mafia have traditionally been involved in trash management with their main…

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In Delhi, waste generates power — and debate

Panchabuta-Renewable Energy & Cleantech in India

According to reports, by the end of this year, Delhi will have its second waste-to-energy plant generating electricity at the landfill near Ghazipur. A similar plant, Timarpur Okhla Waste to Energy plant, sited in the vicinity of a residential colony and a hospital, has started generation since the beginning of this year.

The Delhi government is buoyant that it has finally found a solution to tackling the ever-increasing piles of waste. No government wants to grapple with millions of tonnes of waste dumped on prime land, polluting the groundwater and the air and threatening to multiply.

Delhi, with limited space, views waste-to-energy plants as a win-win solution. “Energy production is incidental. Our main concern is waste,” says Shakti Sinha, Principal Secretary, Power, summing up the government’s perception of these plants.

“The plants are absolutely safe,” he asserts. “We use state-of-the-art technology, and these are run as per the European Union norms…

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Waste Management in Stockholm

Misc. on land use planning (with a bias on Copenhagen)

I just came across an article in “City, Culture and Society”, dealing with Urban growth and waste management optimization in Stockholm and Adelaide. In Figure 2 in the results section the authors show a comparison of waste management systems in the two cities. However, for Stockholm they present only national data, assuming that this is also representative for the capital. Well, that striked me a bit because I am working with city data quite a lot and was wondering if there isn’t better data out there. In the database Urban Audit, maintained by Eurostat, you can find data for over 300 cities in Europe to a lot of different issues. Stockholm is one of the cities covered and waste data from 2008 was available, so I produced the graph below – in the same style as done in the mentioned article.

If you have access to the article

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MSW to Energy – A Quick Glance

Energy Matters

Brief Introduction: There have been  lots of  reports from all over the world about utilization of municipal solid waste(MSW) for conversion to energy. In India too, we have been talking and discussing about segregation of household waste to enable subsequent processing activities. But it has not taken off in any significant way due to a number of reasons. In the next couple of posts I intend to summarize the approaches followed worldwide along with Technology options available. Hopefully, it will throw light on what we need to do in India to put our act together for exploiting municipal solid waste (MSW) and its conversion to energy. Globally too, although there are quite a few success stories to relate, it has been rather difficult to sustain interest.  This post is based on a recent extensive report from EPRI (Electrical Power Research Institute) on this subject. I do believe there are several…

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Sustainability in Nordic Countries – Few Lessons

What is Plasma Waste-to-Energy Technology