I was recently reading of a new project proposed here in Ottawa, Canada about build up a garbage gasification unit in order to alleviate the garbage disposal problem.
Anybody who has ever flown over Canada knows there is not a space problem there. I just took a 8 hour train ride in Canada, and this is surely true. The concept of recapturing the digestive gases of a land fill never even begin to give a return on investment. They are a booddoggle pure and simple. If you want to investigate this further, look at the one in Tonitown, AR. Canada has huge supplies of fossil fuels and is a huge supplier of crude oil to the US. I live in Florida and we have many land fills (called Mount Trashmore usually), but I do not know of any that recapture methane. Florida also has more people than Canada, with only a fraction of the land mass, but when I fly over it, we have plenty of available space for the foreseeable future. Water is in short supply, but not land.
True, the recapture of gases from existing landfills is a proposition that is fraught with inefficiency. But the original post referrs to actually burning the waste in a pre-built facility (much like a small coal-fired power plant that burns waste coal). The process takes the waste (garbage) and burns it at an extremely high temperature so that complete combustion is ensured. With complete combustion like this you get less bad gasses in the exhaust (CO, SOx, NOx, etc...). And a side effect of the burning is the you can heat water into steam, which in turn can be used to generate electricity. My thoughts are that it is a good process, which provides electricity while eliminating a lot of waste. I have a background in Chemical Engineering and I've actually seen the coal-fired versions of these plants in operation, and they are very clean. (One in particular that I toured was in the middle of a very busy college town and at no time do I recall anyone complaining of smells, dirt, soot, etc... AND it provided about 30 Megawatts of power for the college as well as steam for college systems that used it.)
There are several areas in Florida where Waste Management has installed small pilot plants to collect the methane from dumped trash. True not very efficient, but if the dump site is big enough for long term dumping, the time line may be sufficient to write off the cost of the collection and compression equipment needed to fire the methane and generate power to feed back to the power company. The biggest problem with the incinerating of trash is the inability to find a stack gas scrubber to remove the CO2. One concept for many of the CO2 producing facilities was a clean up system and liquifaction. Years ago there was a shortage of CO2 (dry ice) now there is more feedstock than the world can use.
Lake County Florida where I live when not RV’ing has had and expensive horrible experience with the incineration method of trash removal. I am still thinking that the original poster was referring to the methane capture system, but either one is a boondoggle. Google Lake County Florida incinerator for our expensive horror story.
Gee, thank you gentlemen, now I know what I am expecting from what is being built here, thanks god is a few miles away from my house. I appreciate your input Galli
If it is the incinerator system, be advised that there was a huge problem with heavy metal contamination in the surrounding areas. The remaining ash finally made into ingots and disposed of in some special ground water proof landfill system. All in all, living so close to one can not be a good thing. Even if there is no problem, it can effect property values negatively.
