Drug Disposal with Waste-to-Energy (no separate incinerator required!)
An article at Forbes.com states that a company called Capital Returns and others are collecting outdated and unused pharmaceuticals and burning them in some of the nation's waste-to-energy facilities. These collection programs help to prevent the un-used drugs from ending up in the environment (or stashed in drawers where little kids or people wanting to get high can get them).
This has been done for years, companies such as Covanta provide services for this kind of thing. Mainly corporations with sensitive information use it. Everything from sensitive documents and outdated food to narcotics and counterfeit products are hauled to a WTE facility and dumped into the charging hopper. From there it eventually makes its way into the furnace and the mass majority of it comes out of the stack as carbon dioxide and water. It is popular with the police to burn up all of the plants they collect from growing operations. To the dismay of the public, WTE combustion is so efficient that no psychoactive plume emanates from the stack.
It would be nice if the unused pills could be re-sold (or given) to other people who need them, but of course there are all kinds of health and safety issues that come along with that. So the burners are the next best place for them, as flushing them down the commode as is commonly done puts them into the hydrosphere where they can do harm and possibly bioaccumulate. Throwing them in the trash will send them to a landfill most of the time, which is not a terrible place but waste-to-energy is a much better option due to the fact that they will not be a legacy for the future.
Most of the collected pills are being disposed of at municipal waste-to-energy plants. They are trying to get clearance to combust them at a facility used for hazardous waste. I say stick with the municipal plants. They burn just as hot, are cheaper, and they recover energy. They are burning something that was designed for people to put into their body, I think that municipal combustion should be sufficient (see below).
One Plant is All you Need!Separate medical waste incinerators do not make sense. The volume of medical waste is so small compared to municipal waste, and as long as a proper program is put in place at waste-to-energy facilities for the handling of medical waste, there should be no need for separate medical waste units. Once it gets into the furnace at a waste-to-energy plant there is no need for additional energy input. The municipal waste produces all of the heat needed to burn the medical waste; dedicated medical waste units typically have gas-fired burners that provide the energy needed to burn stubborn infectious waste. That's energy going down the drain. There is also no need for separate flue gas cleaning systems, and any energy that is there gets recovered.
Don't burn stuff with toxic metals in it - that is dumb to do anytime. Everyone knows that incineration cannot destroy metals no matter how hot the fire or how sophisticated the APC system. Better yet, don't MAKE stuff with toxic metals in it! On a trip to the home improvement store today I was reminded that we still sell herbicides based on arsenic. At least DDT decomposes eventually!
Side Note: I found it interesting how the Spell Checker dictionary in Firefox recommended "com bust" when I typed the word "combust"WTE projects getting help from U.S. Government
After over a decade of dormancy, the waste-to-energy industry in the United States is getting a boost. President Bush spoke of "reducing gasoline consumption by 20% over the next ten years", and biofuels are one way to attain that goal. Washington is providing some funds to producers of cellulosic ethanol, as the only way to really go forward with biofuels is to get away from the use of corn, and towards the use of cellulose-based plant materials and waste products.
Instead of municipal waste incineration plants, these newer waste-to-energy facilities will chemically convert waste materials into alcohol to be used as a transportation fuel. Incinerators, while a mature and relatively simple technology, produce electricity and district heating - something that we can produce using renewable, nuclear, or co2al energy.
Incineration is not out of the equation, however. Incineration of poultry litter for the production of electricity is also being proposed. Anaerobic digestion is another technology which is gaining use by farmers of cattle and swine for disposal of the manure. The use of municipal waste as fuel is still attractive because the WTE facilities can be built in urban areas where demand for district heating exists and waste would otherwise be hauled for long distances to landfills. District heating can be converted to district cooling using absorbtion chillers - taking air conditioning strain off of the power grid. An incinerator burning 1000 tons of post-recycling, post-source reduction waste per day can produce about 25 MW of electricity and 100 MW of district heating.
» Read Article at Dow Jones MarketWatch: Energy Producers take another look at trash
Incinerator firms trying to burn old image
An article in the Toronto globeandmail.com talks of increased interest in incineration/WTE in Cananda.Currently, Canada uses waste-to-energy to deal with about three percent of its municipal solid waste. Cheap hydroelectric power and vast areas available for landfilling have limited the ambition in building new WTE facilities in that country. A marred public image of incineration is also an issue, as old incinerators were extremely polluting.
The Canadians have a high carbon footprint, despite their high use of hydroelectric energy. Waste-to-energy may just part of the answer to that problem. Instead of shipping waste to landfills in the U.S. and elsewhere, burn it at plants in the cities and put every last joule to work, making both electricity and district heating hot water.
Not to say that the U.S. can't improve...
"Waste-to-Energy Plants" - A Status Report
A short article posted on HealthNewsDigest.com discusses waste-to-energy briefly.
I have to say that there is a part of this article which states "According to Greenpeace International, WtE facilities are also among the largest sources of dioxin emissions in industrialized countries" while data from the U.S. EPA shows that backyard trash burning (barrel burning) in the U.S. results in almost 60 times more dioxin pollution than waste-to-energy facilities across the United States.
» Read on at Health News Digest
Covanta Onondaga receives OSHA VPP
Covanta Energy's Onondaga waste-to-energy facility in New York will be awarded the "VPP Star" designation today.
VPP Star is a program by OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) to promote workplace safety and each facility must meet certain minimum requirements to receive VPP Star designation.
» Read More At Covanta
