The EU would like us all to do a Blog Action Day* post on The Environment today**.
Here's my ha'penny worth...
Waste incineration reduces landfill*** and is a cheap and efficient way of generating electricity.
For example, the proposed waste incinerator at Belvedere, East London, will be able to burn over 500,000 tons of waste a year (the waste generated by about 400,000 households in a year) and generate 66 megawatt-hours of electricity per year****, or enough for 66,000 homes.
They seem to have realised the elegance of this up in Scotland as well.
For sure, households should recycle their rubbish first, and sort out the bottles, cans, newspapers and bio-degradable stuff*****, what's left is plastic, cardboard, polystyrene, babies' nappies, broken toys etc, all stuff that doesn't bio-degrade very well but has a killer calorific value, as it consists largely of petro-carbons.
* Acronym 'BAD'
** I'm jumping the gun here by a few minutes.
*** This paranoia about landfill is overrated. Low value agricultural land in the UK goes for £3,000 per acre, but the Landfill Tax you'd have to pay to use it for land fill is nearly £1,000,000 per acre.
**** The company blurb that I linked to says "66 megawatts" but I assume they mean "66 megawatt-hours".
***** Which can be used to creaste compost, or even better, used in methane capture plants, CH4 is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2.
Meh
2 hours ago
2 comments:
WHoops, full link here.
Also check out this podcast on recycling and this followup.
There are three kinds of recycling;
1) Recycling that makes economic sense (because the raw materials are valuable aluminium cans etc).
2) Waste separation, e.g. glass bottles, that has little value, but glass neither rots nor burns so is no good for CH4 capture or incineration.
3) Recycling that makes no economic sense. If it is better value to burn plastic and cardboard than to recycle it, then we should burn it.
BTW, landfill is incredibly cheap, it's The Boys In Brussels who have decided, more or less on a whim, that it should be discouraged.
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