I came across two interesting posts about the recycling of waste into energy sources. First, Renewable Energy World wrote a piece about the topic with emphasis on municipal waste. The article says, “In 2007, the US produced 254 million tons of municipal solid wasteâ€, and this ranges from “organic material in landfills to waste from the chemical industry that must be treated as hazardous materialâ€.
What to do with all this? Incineration is not the best option because of the toxic material produced by this process. A better option is the technology that InEnTec has developed, called Plasma Enhanced Melter, or PEM™, which consists of heating “waste to very high temperatures using electrically charged gas (plasma), breaking down organic material and creating a variety of products.†The company applied its technology for the first time on a commercial-scale production facility earlier this year where it converted household garbage into ethanol for cars and trucks.
“InEnTec’s Plasma Enhanced Melter has huge advantages over both conventional ethanol production and conventional waste disposal,†said Jeffrey Surma, President and CEO of InEnTec. “It is a conversion system and not an incineration process, so emissions are extremely low with very low CO2 emissions. The feedstock is garbage or industrial waste. This means one of the modern world’s most vexing problems—how to get rid of tons and tons of garbage—now becomes one of its most abundant energy resources. It doesn’t compete with the world’s food supply or even cultivatable land, and it significantly reduces the need for landfills which produce greenhouse gases and can leach toxins into groundwater,†Surma added.
Elsewhere, the International Herald Tribune has an article about the experiences of different cities with turning trash into biogas, which is great because it does two things at the same time: waste disposal and energy regeneration. It sounds like the kind of stuff we should be aiming at and local governments have an important role to play in the production of biomethane. They should start taking it more seriously than they currently are.
What is burning in incineration? Most things are converted from oil! Is oil renewable? Who made this ferry tale? Incineration gives rise to new production with a big demand of energy! Recycling and kryo- recycling could avoid this energy- demand.