Satire: WTE-U
One thing that I have noticed about the waste stream here at college is that it has an incredibly high calorific value - all of the dry paper, plastic salad containers, cardboard, bottles, toilet paper/paper towels, disposable paper and plastic eating utensils. Think of it - pizza boxes galore, soda bottles, coffee cups from the cafeteria, newspapers, frozen food outer boxes and plastic trays, hundreds of red polystyrene "beer pong" cups, the beer case boxes. The energy content of this stuff rivals that of coal and even crude oil.
There is not much in the way of wet and putrescible waste. These streams of waste are the optimal for utilization in a waste-to-energy facility. On top of their high energy content, there is the fact that these waste streams are hard to control and most people are more concerned with partying than recycling and segregating their waste. Packed schedules and breakneck busy lifestyles boost waste production even further by the use of convenience items and eliminating any possible thought of "Should I reduce how much trash I produce?"
Any city with a sizeable student population would have plenty of stuff to stoke their WTE furnaces, as long as they either store the desks, beds, clothes, furniture, and other perfectly good stuff that people throw away at the end of the year, supplement combustion with biomass, or reduce WTE throughput over the summer.
The same institutions who dump their trash into the furnaces would be looking to buy the resulting heat at a dirt-cheap price, because we know how people like to use the window as the thermostat! Hey! That hot radiator is a result of the virus-laden laptop computer/clothes you were too lazy to wash/trash can (yes, they were so lazy they just threw the WHOLE CAN out the window into the dumpster! ) you threw in the trash the other day. Charge up your cell phone and iPod with last week's party cups.
