Oslo is turning garbage into energy and is running out of garbage

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/world/europe/oslo-copes-with-shortage-of-garbage-it-turns-into-energy.html

by danso • 13 years ago

77 60 13 years ago

Oslo is powering their city by putting black ash into the air, which absorbs heat from sunlight, slightly increasing the amount of energy in all of our environmental systems. The place is powered by externalities, just like China. This solution is no better than coal-generated electricity, and this feel-good article is no more useful than clean-coal articles.

danso• 13 years ago

Don't some of the modern systems have processes that mitigate the released ash?

I found their recycling systems to be even more impressive sounding than the garbage incineration

jre• 13 years ago

My understanding is that the garbage would be burnt anyway so better use it for heating.

jessriedel• 13 years ago

But the ash doesn't stick around, does it? Do you have an order-of-magnitude estimate for the heating effects of the ash? I'm guessing it's trivial compared to carbon offset.

tomsaffell• 13 years ago

There seems to be some debate about whether particulate matter has a net-warming or net-cooling effect. It's difficult to estimate empirically, because there are so many uncontrolled variables.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#Aerosols

niels_olson7• 13 years ago

Ash represents incomplete combustion. I'm pretty the engineers are motivated to ensure the ash is a minor waste product compared the gasses, but somebody should check me on that.

riveteye• 13 years ago

Hmm. I was under the impression that burning garbage is different in that you are burning carbon that is already in play in the carbon cycle system - unlike burning coal, which without human intervention would never be introduced into the environment at such a rapid pace. I could be wrong! I was disappointed by the lack of an explanation, or even links to background on the science of this process. Just a puff/fluff piece IMHO.

jlgreco4• 13 years ago

It would really depend on what is being burnt. If it is primarily food waste, paper products, natural fibers, wood, etc.. then yeah; all of that carbon was already "in the system". If they are burning lots of garbage made from petrochemicals then that garbage is basically just another fossil fuel.

As I understand it, the real issue with "clean coal" is not the soot but rather the CO2. Depending on what this garbage actually is, the CO2 problem isn't really a problem in this case.

niels_olson7• 13 years ago

Sitting in a hole in the ground is from whence it came. Trash collectors should be getting substantial carbon credits. Their credits should increase the deeper they manage to bury the stuff. Sending it into the atmosphere, especially near the Arctic circle, if atrociously bad.

frenchman_in_ny• 13 years ago

"This solution is no better than coal-generated electricity"

I'm not sure that's true at all. The only way a waste-to-energy plant can import waste from cross-borders is by having R1 status, R1 being a measure of energy recovery from the municipal waste that is burned [1].

On top of this, the plants (generally) recycle the plastic / metal that isn't burned, sell the fuel ash (to stabilize roads, etc), cogenerate steam from additional energy production, and either sell back to the municipalities the natural gas generated by the organic waste digestors or use it to generate additional electricity.

[1] http://www.cewep.eu/information/publicationsandstudies/state...

jtchang• 13 years ago

I always thought burning garbage is really bad for the environment. Aren't there dangerous chemicals that are released if the garbage is not incinerated?

kiba• 13 years ago

It seems that the garbage is sorted through before they burned it.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

At least in the US, a modern incinerator produces cleaner exhaust gases than a power plant does. This is because the air quality restrictions are quite tight, and building an incinerator from the ground up with those restrictions in mind results in exhaust flues with filters to catalyze by products into non-aerosols.

That said, providing heat is the best use for this since even low grade heat (100 - 150 degrees C) is usable for heating buildings and water for washing etc. But you can't pull a lot of electricity out of it with steam turbines.

seanmcdirmid2• 13 years ago

This would work very well for the central heating systems (mostly coal or gas based) of northern China. We also have plenty of garbage to burn. But I wouldn't trust the government to implement it with the correct environmental safeguards.

guan• 13 years ago

As others have noted, you can sort out the worst garbage and install filters, and modern filters are very good.

It’s still worse for the air than putting the garbage in landfills, but landfills have their problems too.

puivert2• 13 years ago

It's better than landfill without methane recovery, greenhouse gas wise.

Brajeshwar• 13 years ago

Can you please come to India and help us. We need this very badly.

bernardoopinto• 13 years ago

That was it came to my mind when I read the article!: "Why not expand to India?"

zkar• 13 years ago

Being a tropical country, India does not need much of indoor heating. Fine option for heating water.

rexreed2• 13 years ago

Hah! I just posted this. Would it make air pollution worse... or just the same?

rexreed2• 13 years ago

I suggest expansion into Mumbai... plagued by trash, lacking reliable energy.

niels_olson7• 13 years ago

Unlike a developed country like Norway, doing this in Mumbai almost makes sense. Get them quickly up to a level where they can hop over a bunch of our generational mistakes and go straight to solar.

But in a developed country with abundant hydroelectric resources, this is shameful. Unless they recover all the waste products, including all the gases and ash, and bury them in old mines.

seanmcdirmid2• 13 years ago

The heat is not useful for generating electricity, it could be used to heat buildings, but I bet that is hardly a concern in Mumbai.

deltaqueue• 13 years ago

I'm still not convinced this is a viable solution for waste management (not that there's a simple alternative), given the environmental implications. Yes, air pollution is pretty regulated and has been reduced significantly since the 80's[1], but the residues resulting from the filtering process are still heavily toxic and it's not clean by any means[2].

[1] http://www.seas.columbia.edu/earth/wtert/sofos/Waste_Inciner...

[2] Section 10: http://www.ecomed.org.uk/content/IncineratorReport_v3.pdf

mathiasben• 13 years ago

Could existing landfills be mined to supply this need?

lobster_johnson• 13 years ago

There was a recent episode of Bang Goes the Theory [1] about how the UK has started to turn landfills into "bioreactors" [2], by covering them with earth (essentially turning them into parks). Underneath the top-soil layer, the landfill is covered with a layer that traps the methane and sends it into a methane-capturing system.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s1mzl

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

Apparently Oslo needs to come help me clean my apartment.

jgj2• 13 years ago

> Yet though Oslo considered the Italian garbage, it preferred to stick with what it said was the cleaner and safer English waste. “It’s a sensitive question,” Mr. Mikkelsen said.

This is literally the most intriguing thing in my life right now. What a tease. Does anyone have insight into why Italian garbage is less safe?

flurdy• 13 years ago

The Mafia. They control some of the Italian garbage and you are not sure what the garbage actually contain.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/200... http://scienceline.org/2009/09/blog-easter-mafia-toxic-waste...

Samuel_Michon2• 13 years ago

Oh, you haven’t seen Gomorrah? You’re in for a treat!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0929425/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(film)

jgj2• 13 years ago

Will. Do. Grazie.

jere2• 13 years ago

This scenario plays out in the board game "Power Grid." It's a game about running power plants and one of the 4 resources is garbage. It's a great late game fuel, but it can get scarce. http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid

martythemaniak• 13 years ago

Very good game if you like Catan-style games.

jere2• 13 years ago

Agreed. I've heard good things for a while, but I was very impressed when I played it last week for the first time.

Also (this is why I was tempted to post about it on HN), it's very heavy on number crunching and has a nice CS feel to it. Placing your cities is, I think, an instance of minimum spanning trees. Thought MST has a lot of applications, interestingly the first algorithm for finding them was invented in 1926 for "efficient electrical coverage of Moravia." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bor%C5%AFvka%27s_algorithm

ttrreeww3• 13 years ago

I guess we can ship our to be recycled electronic parts to them instead of Chinese landfills then.

up_and_up• 13 years ago

What about using thermo depolymerization?

Basically, using heat and pressure, turn literally anything that is carbon-based into water, natural gas and oil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

http://robertrapier.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/tdp12.png

http://www.stvnbrgs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2013-01-2...

kjetil• 13 years ago

Slightly related fun fact: Oslo also uses recovered heat from sewage to heat homes.

http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/4032

teeja• 13 years ago

Lest we of the US be inclined to scoff, most of what we burn is garbage - coal, oil, gas, dead wood, all remnants of dead life. The world has abundant natural energies, but for a century we've feasted on the easiest. Now the bill is due.

johansch• 13 years ago

History-less american barbarians! :)

Sweden started this craze: actually Norway exported their garbage there:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/28/163823839/swe...

Or see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4702319

13b9f227ecf0• 13 years ago

The word you're looking for is ahistorical.

Oslo is turning garbage into energy and is running out of garbage

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