Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy

http://www.pachamama.org/blog/models-of-sustainability-sweden-runs-out-of-garbage

by samspenc • 13 years ago

243 188 13 years ago

tlongren2• 13 years ago

Ames, Iowa, home of Iowa State University, does something similar. All of their trash gets burned to generate electricity for the city. Seems to work quite well for them, been doing it for probably 30 or 40 years, now.

rquantz• 13 years ago

How do they produce safe emissions from trash? They have a hard enough time when burning something where they control the input.

tlongren2• 13 years ago

I have no idea. Here's a page about the Resource Recovery System: http://www.cityofames.org/index.aspx?page=168

wf• 13 years ago

I don't think they do; however, it seems to be possible.[1] Googling "batch oxidation" gives back this PDF[2] describing it. Answering your question again:

"Unlike incinerators and other thermal processes, the BOS™ does not use a high temperature, turbulent processes to reduce the waste. The “quiet”, non‐turbulent smouldering of waste during the gasification phase means that the production of fly‐ash is almost eliminated, and the process does not suffer from temperature peaks and troughs, thus reducing problems with the formation of NOx and dioxins. However, many waste materials contain chemical components which can cause problems in any thermal process. Acid gases and metals must be neutralised and or / removed, and dioxins, furans, and particulates must all be reduced to minute amounts in order to meet the stringent EU legislation and compliance requirements. BOS™ achieves this by the use of a comprehensive Flue Gas Treatment (FGT) system through a dedicated Best Available Technology (BAT) program. The injection of sodium bicarbonate and activated carbon in a powdered form neutralises the acid gases and absorbs heavy metals and dioxins. Urea, injected into the Secondary Combustion Chamber, reduces NOx levels dramatically, and a bag-house filter system removes any last traces of particulate before the exhaust goes to atmosphere."

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/business/energy-environmen...

[2]http://wtecanada.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/WtEC-BOS-Web...

yxhuvud• 13 years ago

Burn it hot enough and emissions turn out mostly ok.

total__C• 13 years ago

Here's a presentation regarding the 'SYSAV' waste-to-energy facility in Malmö, Sweden:

http://www.sysav.se/upload/flash/sysav.swf

There's an extensive pollution collection/scrubbing system that captures the pollutants as solids and liquids.

alipang2• 13 years ago

Better article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/world/europe/oslo-copes-wi...

petercooper2• 13 years ago

This is a naïve but genuine question.. is shipping trash from the UK to Norway and then setting it on fire better for the environment than burying it? (Or, at the very least, is it better to burn trash than to extract and burn something else?)

alex_doom• 13 years ago

Oh they burn it? I though they were doing that bacteria to methane idea?

chestnut-tree2• 13 years ago

"is shipping trash from the UK to Norway and then setting it on fire better for the environment than burying it?"

Definitely! Landfill takes up a lot of space. Yes, it's buried underground, but there is a risk that harmful toxins or chemicals can leak into the soil. Landfill gases can leak into the air. A lot of that rubbish will not decompose.

The UK has a landfill tax to discourage excess waste, but unlike Sweden and Norway, we have not come up with clever, forward-thinking solutions to tackle the problem.

dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

One thing about shipping costs are that they're very low.

A number from oil tankers: the "freight cost" of shipping a supertanker's worth of oil halfway around the world works out to a few pennies per gallon -- 1% of the net cost, and an even smaller fraction of the energy content.

Swannie2• 13 years ago

But completely unrelated.

I agree, it is a better article. But the OP is about Sweden, and reads as a poorly executed "Us too" press release. Your article is about a similar (but slightly different) problem in Norway. Hence my down vote.

phy07• 13 years ago

The article mentions incinerators; I wonder how it is impacting air quality, specifically dioxin levels.

I recently saw this documentary which discusses various approaches to managing trash: http://www.trashedfilm.com/references.php#tabair

EGreg3• 13 years ago

Are there any negative externalities turning garbage into energy? What are the byproducts? Pollution released into the air? Spread to everyone else?

Because this is wonderful!

pyoung• 13 years ago

Sounds like they do a pretty good job of controlling the emissions. My primary concern, and this is a fairly uneducated concern, but I always envisioned a (bleak) future where we had already mined all the precious and rare-earth metals and minerals and were forced to use our garbage dumps to re-claim those materials. Of course a good recycling program, would in theory, prevent this from ever being necessary, but in general, burning stuff to create energy feels sooo 20th century, we should really be using renewables and nuclear.

EGreg3• 13 years ago

Well my primary concern was the garbage and pollution, such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. If we really found a way to cut our garbage down to 4%, that's pretty incredible ... of course if we start generating 25x more garbage to begin with then it will negate that.

marvin• 13 years ago

It's certainly a better option than putting it into a landfill, where the organic portion will turn into energy anyway, and the non-organic portion will do nothing but potentially pollute the groundwater.

anateus• 13 years ago

Massive amounts of CO2 primarily. Also dioxins, but there are ways to combat that they may be be employed.

EGreg3• 13 years ago

So where does this CO2 go? Do we need more trees to offset it, or what

memnips• 13 years ago

For a different perspective I found this older article which ponders the economic impact of forcing 9 million people to spend time and energy sorting their trash: http://mises.org/daily/2855

lutorm• 13 years ago

... an article which of course assumes that the costs of the (not spelled out) alternatives are zero...

My parents do this and it's not like it's very onerous.

alipang2• 13 years ago

Well, the point he makes is that the same is true for the other statistics. It'd probably be cheaper environmentally for a garbage truck to pick up all your garbage for instance, rather than each person traveling to the recycling center themselves.

read_again• 13 years ago

Thank you!

I really think the fact that Sweden is 30 time smaller than the US is a significant aspect of the problem, which ought to be highlighted a bit more when doing a comparison between these two countries on their energy models.

How hard would it be for the US to implement such solution (assuming the cost would not be as prohibitive as it is compared with nuclear energy), first in a large city like NY (or LA) as a test bed? Maybe something like that already exist in the States?

xxpor2• 13 years ago

Go look up Harrisburg and how their trash->energy plant as worked out.

chc• 13 years ago

Japan has about a third of our population and they do garbage sorting pervasively. I believe it's less onerous than the Swedish scheme, though.

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

Trash sorting is an embarrassingly parallel problem.

fetbaffe8• 13 years ago

Mr Bylund's article has some points, but I rather read scientific critisism than political.

kazagistar• 13 years ago

Last I checked, no one is "forced" to do anything. They are free to let the trash pile up in their homes, so long as they keep it from impacting their neighbors. Instead, the service of trash disposal is being offered with restrictions.

thaumasiotes• 13 years ago

And if you wish to engage a more sane trash disposal service?

anonymous• 13 years ago

I find sorting garbage to be better and cleaner for me, personally, actually. You don't have one large festering heap in your home, you have three heaps and only one of them actually smells. The rest are used up plastic containers, bottles, paper, etc. - materials that don't decompose on their own. You get to throw all the biological waste in one place, which can be smaller than the rest and you can clean it up every other day. You can of course throw all your trash away every other day, but it's easier when you only have to throw away only a small portion of it.

I currently live in a city that doesn't collect trash separately and I still separate my trash - it's just nicer and cleaner.

The marketing budget needed to convince people to transition to the new model will pay itself off shortly. Consider also that you'll get unpaid "split-trash evangelists" in most neighbourhoods doing your work for you.

zith• 13 years ago

That article is biased and full of exaggerations (and possibly also outright errors). I live inside the city in Stockholm and have lived both in a suburb and a small town in another part of Sweden in my life. No one I've met spend much time "cleaning and sorting" their garbage. Sure, we might rinse out our cans and milk cartons before putting them in their respective bags underneath the sink, but that takes probably less than three seconds, and we do it mostly so that it won't smell. I've never met anyone that separates the paper from cans. Everyone I know would laugh at such ideas.

Furthermore, the kinds of things we recycle from day to day do not consist of more than 6 categories. Two colors of glass, metal (cans mostly), cartons, paper, plastic. Everyone I know collects this in their own home in paper bags, and then leaves them at a collection point close to their house when they get full. And of course, we don't normally take an extra trip to do this. I leave it on my way to the subway, other people might leave them when they take the car to work. It's really not much of an extra workload. I'm guessing I spend 15 minutes a month on my recycling.

Then we have more rare trash. Electronics, batteries, light bulbs, wood, paint etc. For the suburbs and small towns they have larger recycling plants in each municipality which you can drive to. They have shipping containers where you dump your old bikes, tv's, your large pine tree that you cut down to get some more sun in your yard, etc. A typical family might visit this place one to three times a year to dump some more hazardous or clunky trash.

If you live in an apartment complex (and possibly don't have access to a car) there's usually a room in the complex for all of these things. They have the plastic, glass, metal, batteries and electronics containers close to your own apartment.

For me who live in the city and don't have access to a car, there is actually a truck that comes around a few times a year for me to deposit these things. It has a few collection points close to me (within walking distance) and sends out a text message to my phone a few weeks before they're coming, besides having a schedule online.

Having been raised in this type of a recycling system, I'm always amazed by people, even in Sweden, who think it's too cumbersome. Sure, it happens that I forget to empty my recycling bins at the collection points some times, and then I do throw cartons and cans in my regular garbage (which from what I know is not illegal, btw). But in general there really isn't any noticeable overhead.

ZeroGravitas2• 13 years ago

Libertarians don't like recycling because it's a political intervention into the market.

Not only do they dislike that on principal, if people start to like any one particular intervention (which many people do with recycling) then it undermines their entire political approach.

msvan• 13 years ago

Reminds me of the Daily Show's incisive documentary about Sweden. http://www.videogum.com/65751/the_daily_show_visits_robyns_b...

saltvedt• 13 years ago

My home municipality on the west coast of Norway sends their waste to Sweden to be burned. Before we did that, all households had to sort the waste into separate bins for plastic and organic waste. The organic waste were turned into compost locally. It changed because Miljøverndepartementet (Ministry of Environmental Protection) changed the regulations for depositing plastic waste. So many municipalities have trucks going "over the mountain" with waste to Sweden to be burned. And we actually have the ability to burn waste for energy here on the west coast of Norway, but I guess simply sending it to Sweden is cheaper. And it actually isn't quite as bad as it sounds like because many trucks also deliver manufactured goods from Sweden and would have return empty.

I have no idea what the net environmental benefit is (or if it even is positive (or if anyone really knows)).

jchrisa• 13 years ago

they have a big PDF that shows they've been able to cut emissions of almost all the bad stuff except NOx, a precursor to acid rain: http://www.avfallsverige.se/fileadmin/uploads/forbranning_en...

batiste2• 13 years ago

How is that economically/environmentally sound to import garbage? Garbage should be burned locally to avoid extra pollution.

freehunter• 13 years ago

Not in my backyard!

Seriously, that's why it's shipped rather than burned locally. Some people don't want these plants around them no matter what the benefit.

altcognito• 13 years ago

For example: Detroit

http://www.epa.gov/region07/air/title5/petitiondb/petitions/...

jernfrost• 13 years ago

Probably better to ship it to a high quality incinerator than to burn it in a primitive one emitting lots of pollution.

Transport by sea requires negligible amount of energy. Local transport will likely waste more energy than the transport between two countries.

Dewie• 13 years ago

Sweden is pretty spacious anyway. I could imagine that tightly packed countries in Western Europe could want to alleviate some of that garbage by sending it to be burned in some remote place in Northern Sweden, for example.

INTPenis• 13 years ago

All our green buses here in the south of Sweden (Scania/Skåne) run on biological waste. There are big campaigns for getting more food and having people separate food and biological waste in their trash.

austinrory• 13 years ago

That's certainly better than setting it all out to float in the ocean as new garbage islands.

stretchwithme• 13 years ago

In the third world, the poor comb through garbage dumps seeking anything that might have value.

Obviously, I'd like to see that end. There are many more productive things humans can do that are far less of a risk to their health.

But imagine robots that are able to do it, either at the source or before the garbage is burned or buried or shipped off elsewhere.

A lot of work still remains before that happens, but one day robots will be carefully examining each item discarded and sending it to the most appropriate place.

nawitus• 13 years ago

'Robots' do sort garbage, but it doesn't work as well as humans, and it's probably suited only to certain types of garbage.

briandear4• 13 years ago

Of course, when those poor people can afford robots to scavenge in the trash, they won't need to scavenge in the trash. As far as more productive things, when you don't have anything to eat and nothing of value, there's nothing more productive than trying to find something of value. Also, scavenging trash dumps is probably the least of their health concerns. Let's solve clean water before we start worrying about trash sorting in Somalia.

ballard• 13 years ago

NYC. Problem solved.

  0. NYC, like many big cities, creates a ton of trash (excluding writers and actors).

  1. I didn't see anything about CO2/CO/COx emissions.  Landfills are semi-sequestration.  Burning is definitely not sequestration.  It doesn't seem scalable.  See also: http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_green_why_we_should_build_wooden_skyscrapers.html

aetherson2• 13 years ago

These articles about "running out of garbage" make it sound like a great thing, but it seems to me that it's a big disadvantage of any kind of waste-to-energy scheme. I mean, the concept is that you spend a ton of money making these power generation facilities that do waste-to-energy, and then that cost is partially defrayed by selling the energy.

But if you don't actually have enough garbage to run the facility, then it is that much less cost-efficient. It implies that something has gone badly wrong. Why did you build so many facilities?

return03• 13 years ago

I wonder if they even cost much, after all a furnace is not some terribly new technology. In Copenhagen they seem to have excess money to turn it into a giant smoking ski slope: http://www.archdaily.com/339893/bigs-waste-to-energy-plant-b...

aetherson2• 13 years ago

A brief web search didn't come up with any cost estimates of the Swedish facilities, but this page lists the cost of a singaporean one at about $500 million.

http://www.keppelseghers.com/en/content.aspx?sid=3028

It's possible that that's drastically different than the Swedish ones, but I fundamentally do not believe that any power generation facility is a terribly cheap facility to build or maintain. If you do, I suggest that that is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

bjornsing• 13 years ago

No worries, we have money to burn.

tsotha• 13 years ago

Yes, this is the problem with cellulosic ethanol as well. Right now, when we just discard corn husks and such, it seems like a no-brainer to use them as a free input to an ethanol process. But if you actually scale it up you'll run out of source material pretty quickly.

return03• 13 years ago

Haha look at those socialists, they ran out of energy.

return03• 13 years ago

I thought i didn't have to hold my sarcasm card here.

gvr5• 13 years ago

My dad's condo [edit: condo complex] in Sweden has 10+ different trash cans. You divide your trash into individuals cans for batteries, bulbs, cardboard, paper, compostables, and so forth.

I don't know but I assume that part of the reason that Swedes are able to deal effectively with the trash is that they sort it properly at the source, so that they more easily can process it.

When I read stuff like this it honestly makes me homesick. I've lived half my life on the left side of the political spectrum (Sweden/France) and the other half on the right side here in the US. I love it in SF, but this supposedly "progressive" city has - especially considering how many smart people that live here - an appallingly poor understanding of how to architect a civilized society.

There is no reason this city shouldn't be clean, essentially free of homeless (and sometimes insane) people, have great public roads, excellent public transportation, low crime, worry about more interesting things than what size diamond ring Kanye bought for his lady, and so forth.

There is a good data driven TED talk on how points like the above correlate with wealth and equality: http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html

3pt14159• 13 years ago

It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person. It is more efficient to sort it at the garbage transfer station the way Canadians do. Most places have 3 cans. General, glass/plastic/cardboard, and biodegradable.

Also, SF is considered "progressive" for many of its completely unsustainable policies, like housing controls, which ultimately lead to further economic inefficiency. A truly progressive society is more like Toronto where the poor can generally get help, but we don't mind putting up condos or new office space.

Also the Swedes do some things that are much more right wing than America, like Free Schools (essentially private schools operating with a government payment, similar to the coupon model). It isn't a left-right difference. Furthermore, Sweden has cut services and taxes more than any other western country in the past decade.

Also you can't really compare it anyway. There is a far higher amount of cultural homogeneity in Sweden than the US, even in the white portion of the US, and the average IQ is 3 or 4 points higher.

As for homelessness, you are living in SF. This is what you get. The US has a much higher veteran rate than Sweden which highly correlates to homelessness (usually due to PTSD and associated drug abuse) and the capital of homelessness in North America is SF.

philsnow• 13 years ago

It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person.

I think he means that there are 10 cans for the entire condo complex.

Also, forcing individual _taxpayers_ to sort trash really keeps environmentalism in the forefront of voters' minds, which I imagine makes it much easier to keep environment-friendly legislation and public works projects going.

Consider the opposite extreme, having a single bin that absolutely everything goes in. It would be easy to just completely forget about whatever it is you're throwing away and never think about what ultimate fate each piece is destined for.

keerthiko2• 13 years ago

A big factor in homelessness is also just weather. You get far more homeless people in a location with year-long homogeneously nice weather like SF, because you actually won't die being homeless. Swedish winters are harsh, and the country's not so big that these people can just go somewhere nicer for the winter. I don't have any stats (does anyone?), but I'm certain a good proportion of the homeless in SF arrived from further away.

I do think the northern European schooling/education model makes a lot more sense, and could be a solution for a lot of the societal problems at the root. However, the cultural diversity of SF makes that a much more complex problem than it is in Sweden/Finland. And so we come full circle, this stuff is just not that easy as "look it works over there, we should do it too"

qw• 13 years ago

My city (Oslo) has reduced some of the cans by having an optical sorting robot at the garbage processing facility. You can use one can for general, biodegradable and plastic by using different colored bags.

gvr5• 13 years ago

Regarding schools: the "Free Schools" are quite unusual, almost all universities and certainly the top ones are run by the state and free, and people are accepted based on academic merit. I went to arguably the best engineering physics program in Sweden; it was free, and they paid me a $250 stipend per month, the rest of money needed to live was borrowed at a low rate.

It is true that Sweden has cut services a lot in the last few years and the "right wing" coalition had unprecedented voter support in the last election. There's a massive backlash against them, and I'll be shocked if the ruling coalition or party doesn't swing massively left next year - as will most Swedes.

Regarding vets: yes I'm sure that if you send somebody to the hell that is war, and doesn't take care of him when he comes back, that this will increase his chances of ending up in the streets vs the average civilian. I'm not sure what your point is. Maybe we should reallocate some of the wealth to taking better care of these people, and enter into fewer wars?

workhere-io• 13 years ago

Sweden has cut services and taxes more than any other western country in the past decade.

They still have some of the highest taxes in the world and an extensive welfare state.

rorrr22• 13 years ago

It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person

It's actually much more efficient. Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial.

I would love to have 10 cans and help the environment. Something like this:

Glass, plastic, paper, metal, bio/food, electronics, rubber, textiles, everything else.

Right now most of that stuff gets mixed and gets piled up polluting ground water.

deepGem• 13 years ago

Considering that the average trash stays for at least 10-12 hours inside the house/apartment, it's inefficient to segregate once the waste is in this mixed state for that duration. At least the organic/inorganic waste has to be segregated at source.

ZeroGravitas2• 13 years ago

So on the IQ thing, is that because they properly care for the physical and mental well-being of their children, expectant mothers and parents? Or is it because they are some kind of Aryan super-race?

rotskoff• 13 years ago

The suggestion that Sweden is homogeneous is too common and simply false. I've lived in Stockholm for 6 months and it's a very diverse city. Far more cultural and economic diversity than, say, many Midwestern cities of comparable size. In fact, wikipedia can point you to the facts "As of 2011, Statistics Sweden reported that around 19.6% or 1.858.000 inhabitants of Sweden had foreign background, defined as born abroad or born in Sweden by two parents born abroad." (from "Demographics of Sweden")

What is more, the notion that homogeneity and IQ have anything to do with the capacity of a nation to recycle is both offensive and absurd.

bkanber• 13 years ago

It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person.

I don't understand how you can make this claim when it has so obviously worked to great success for Sweden. The evidence shows that they are the best at managing their trash; why shouldn't we learn from them?

effn• 13 years ago

I don't know but I assume that part of the reason that Swedes are able to deal effectively with the trash is that they sort it properly at the source, so that they more easily can process it.

Nope, you can burn unsorted garbage. The reason for sorting is so you can recycle materials instead of putting it in a incinerator.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

essentially free of homeless

I feel it's worth mentioning that other cities and even other states have long had an unofficial policy of sending their homeless/crazy people to places like SF. This has now become the subject of lawsuits - see for example http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/12/first-lawsuit-fil...

As a fellow Euro, I agree with your overall argument, however.

jpadkins4• 13 years ago

so when is sweden going to accept open immigration from all of the poorer neighbors?

I'll be impressed if it can keep social cohesion while allowing immigrants to make a better life for themselves. It's easy for an elite society to stay closed and elite. SF is open to some of the poorest people on earth.

arvinjoar• 13 years ago

As a EU member Sweden is open to most of our European neighbors... We also take in way more immigrants than most.

gaadd333• 13 years ago

"SF is open to some of the poorest people on earth." no more so than the rest of the United States is insofar as immigration goes. I don't believe there are many (any?) people living in SF that qualify as the poorest people on earth though.

purplelobster• 13 years ago

Did you just call the American poor "some of the poorest people on earth?" Or were you talking about immigrants? One town in Sweden (Södertälje) has received more Iraqi refugees alone than all of the US has, the country that actually started the war. Sweden's immigrants are actually some of the poorest people on earth, mainly refugees of war and people who would be prosecuted/killed if they returned to their home country. Contrast that with the US that receives heaps of well educated people every year. Today, the ratio of foreign born people in Sweden is roughly equal to that of the US, but again, mainly refugees.

yason• 13 years ago

In Finland, neighbouring Sweden, we also have more different containers for different trash than you'd care for. It takes time to learn all that and when you've finally sorted out all your trash properly to different bins, you sit on your balcony and look at the garbage truck reversing to the yard. The guy goes inside the garbage shed and brings out one bin of certain color, empties it in the truck, and drives away to the next address only to come back a few days later to do the same. When your mind accidentally multiplies this activity by the number of different colored bins you have there, you begin to imagine the local emissions produced by these different trucks circling around all the time, emptying one type of trash each. There are so many bins that each of them must be rather small, so the buffering capacity of the garbage sheds causes excess traffic and pollution due to regular visits by the garbage trucks. Further, some things are collected in certain recycling points, such as non-returnable glass waste like jars and olive oil bottles, which means people take them there with private cars!

For a long time we used to have general waste and compostables. That was quite understandable because you really want the compostables into a separate heap because of...well, composting and you can produce bio gas off composts if the percentage of decomposing waste is high enough. But I'm pretty sure the separation of glass, wood, papers, cardboards etc. could be done in some automated way that reaches a good enough success rate that would make it economically and ecologically viable.

hvidgaard2• 13 years ago

It depends on the scale. In Denmark, while we can do it privately by driving to recycle stations - highly inefficient as you mention. The sorting in urban areas however, is mostly glass, paper (and the like), and general waste - it does not matter if a truck picks this up, because he would have to do so as general waste anyway, if it wasn't sorted. Many larger stores also have facilities for batteries, but I'm unsure how many uses them as most people I know toss them in with the general waste.

It has also been tried many times to separate organic matter from the rest (different colour of bags), and using automatic systems to sort it. It has been mostly dropped because it's more expensive than just burning everything unfortunately. Which brings me to the main point. We can be very efficient and recycle most of the waste, find a optimum point where we minimize the environmental footprint - it's just expensive, and the first thing to go when the city need to save money. People just don't care about future generations, or don't believe it's a problem, to accept the cost of recycling.

codex• 13 years ago

Do they sequester the massive amounts of CO2 that trash burning generates? If not, sinking that carbon into the ground may be a better idea. Or not: landfills produce methane and other natural gases which are more potent than carbon dioxide if they're not captured and reused. Has anyone done the math?

dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

Most of a typical waste stream consists of current/recent biomass -- a surprising amount by both volume and weight is paper and paper products.

Plastics and such do represent fossilized carbon (usually) but are a smaller percentage overall.

So the net carbon impact is much lower than burning fossil fuels. And yes, the methane reduction helps, though methane does have a pretty short (about a decade) residency in the atmosphere as I understand.

perssontm• 13 years ago

Interesting the me as a Swede, I read about this "problem" at HN first. Never read/heard anything about this in mainstream swedish media. I might if course have missed it, but if its such a big problem as the article like to state, I like to think I should have heard of it, otherwise it would be fair to question the sources of this.

dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

This story illustrates both the upsides and limitations of trash-to-energy programs.

On the positive side: many sources will pay you to take their trash from them. There's nothing like free energy.

On the negative side:

- Sweden's exhaustion of its own sources of trash show that the concept is inherently limited, even in an abundant consumption economy. That is, one which is producing ample waste streams. As the article notes: "the fastidious population of Northern Europe produces only about 150 million tons of waste a year, he said, far too little to supply incinerating plants that can handle more than 700 million tons." That's a kind way of saying that Sweden's overbuilt its trash-to-electric capacity by 467%.

- Some trash is more equal than others. Countries such as Switzerland and Germany which offer highly segregated waste streams find themselves with many takers. Italy, who is stereotypically ... less organized, not so much. Again, noted in the article.

- There are issues with contaminants, which require monitoring of the input waste stream, the combustion process, and emissions controls.

- Ultimately there's the question of how much trash will exist in a world with a leaner energy profile. In which case it's likely we'll find that there's a very high excess of trash-to-energy infrastructure, though much of it might be applied to other feedstocks, including biomass. Though this also has its limits:

http://globalecology.stanford.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange...

Putting this in an American context (likely familiar to most readers):

Americans produce 230 million tons of waste stream, about 4.3 - 4.6 pounds per person per day.

http://www.learner.org/interactives/garbage/solidwaste.html

http://www.epa.gov/osw/basic-solid.htm

In a best-case scenario, this would be pure biomass. I'll assume the same energy potential as carbohydrate (oil-based products will have roughly double this, glass, metal, and inorganic solids less), at 4 calories/gram, or roughly 971 GWh of electrical energy. That's an appreciable amount of energy, but given that annual electrical production is 4.1 tera watt-hours, my hypothetical puts waste-stream energy production at less than 1/4 of electrical energy usage, or roughly 6% of total energy usage. And that's before considering the energy requirements of collecting and processing the wastestream itself, or the effects on waste production in a reduced-energy environment.

gaadd333• 13 years ago

In your best case scenario, what about the reduced expenditure on shipping trash to places where landfills are open? E.g. I believe NYC ships a good bit of trash down to the Carolinas.

Also only 54% is currently sent to a landfill, so that would reduce your energy return to 524 GWh. That's about 20 years worth of new power plants coming online. (It appears most years the US adds about 20-25 GWh in power generation capacity a year)

vidarh2• 13 years ago

So essentially, waste to energy should be seen primarily as a way to reduce the waste problem, not as a way to produce energy. The energy is just a nice side effect that helps to make it attractive to reduce landfill usage.

So it still serves a useful purpose. It's just not going to solve our energy issues.

dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

That's pretty much my stance.

And for some countries,say, India, which has tremendous issues with trash and a severe energy shortage, this might be useful. If the logistics, pollution, and wastestream segregation issues can be worked out.

tanzam752• 13 years ago

I think you're off by a factor of 1000. I get 980 terawatt-hours of energy.

If, as you say, 971 GWh is equivalent to 6% of total energy usage, then 980 TWh is 6000% total energy usage. Of course, you don't get 100% efficiency in incineration, but an oversupply of 60x leaves a lot of room for inefficiency.

Here's my calculation. I've used scientific notation to reduce the possibility of order-of-magnitude errors:

230 million tons Avoirdupois = 2.3e8 tons
2.3e8 tons * 2e3 pounds/ton = 4.6e11 pounds
4.6e11 pounds * 0.45 kg/pound = 2.07e11 kg
2.07e11 kg * 1000 g/kg = 2.07e14 g
2.07e14 g * 17 kJ/g for carbohydrates = 3.52e15 kJ
3.52e15 kJ * 2.78e-4 kWh/kJ = 9.8e11 kWh

That's 980 billion kWh, or 980 million MWh, or 980 thousand GWh, or 980 TWh.

I wonder if maybe you're getting nutrition Calories (uppercase) confused with gram calories (lowercase). Nutrition Calories are actually kilocalories!!! If you forgot to multiply by 1000 to account for this, then that would explain your result.

In Europe, nutrition labels are listed in kilojoules. This eliminates the confusion over calories.

dredmorbius7• 13 years ago

I'll double-check my math, but suspect my numbers are closer to the truth.

Keep in mind that you're also limited by heat-engine efficiencies. I need to double-check if steam turbines are governed by Carnot cycle (35% max efficiency) or others, but that's another factor to keep in mind.

And yes, the calorie/kilocalorie distinction is important ;-)

dfrey• 13 years ago

Can't they just go to Ikea to get more?

gboone42• 13 years ago

There's a reason the waste-to-energy plant was always my favorite in Sim City. I too ran out of trash a few times.

rkrkrk21• 13 years ago

Dear India - Are you listening ?

31reasons• 13 years ago

Nope. India is practicing Gandhi's 3 monkey principle when it comes to garbage.

throwaway1947• 13 years ago

No. They're busy worshiping 5th generation Gandy monkey.

dschiptsov• 13 years ago

There is Finland with millions Russian tourists - endless source.))

qwertzlcoatl• 13 years ago

I am so overflowing and stuffed from all these NSA revelations, that I read "Snowden Runs Out Of Garbage" two times in a row.

abalone2• 13 years ago

The dirty secret here is CO2 emissions. Everything Sweden does to cut down waste to begin with is awesome. But of course you're going to run out of trash if you BURN EVERYTHING LEFT.

What marks this as a puff piece is the lack of honesty around CO2. The only place they mention it is in comparing it to.. generating the same amount of power from burning oil. It is spun as a way to reduce CO2, because look at all the oil we aren't burning. But this is a disingenuous comparison.

A proper comparison would pit burning trash against renewable energy sources that don't produce greenhouse gases. Nowhere do they even let on that incinerating trash is anything but a total positive for the environment.

There are other signals that this is a PR piece. They note that they've reduced "emissions" by 90-99 percent. Sounds like a miracle. But if you look closely and read all the details.. they don't count CO2 as an "emission".

Source (that the article is based on): http://www.avfallsverige.se/fileadmin/uploads/forbranning_en...

batiste2• 13 years ago

"A proper comparison would pit burning trash against renewable energy sources that don't produce greenhouse gases"

Not really, because carbon neutral renewable energy usable for heating are not plentiful. AFAIK there is only: Sustainable wood pelet burning with particles filters, Heat pumps.

And there is contestations about heat pumps being a green energy source http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/sep/08/heat-pump...

abalone2• 13 years ago

Not plentiful? Iceland does most of their district heating with geothermal. Their total energy production is over 80% renewables.

Of course it's a proper comparison. Even if heat pumps have drawbacks, so does burning trash. You compare the two.

bonchibuji• 13 years ago

A few months back, I wrote a newspaper article about this as well as Mexico City's waste management schemes.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/ikea-burritos-and-...

polskibus• 13 years ago

burning trash for energy is not really efficient. It's better than leaving it on a landfill but it is not the same as recycling. A one-off reuse is still far from perfect situation where most material can be reused (with let's say 10% loss of material in each cycle). Congratulations to Sweden for being better than everyone else but there's still room for improvement!

Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy

Related Stories