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An article at Forbes.com states that a company called Capital Returns and others are collecting outdated and unused pharmaceuticals and burning them in some of the nation's waste-to-energy facilities.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 Everything from sensitive documents and outdated food to narcotics and counterfeit products are hauled to a WTE facility and dumped into the charging hopper.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"Botched Incinerator Losing Steam
Shamefully, the waste-to-energy plant at Harrisburg, PA was supposed to undergo a renovation which would increase its incineration capacity from about 200 tons per day to 800 tons per day, and its electricity output from 8 megawatts to 24 megawatts. The upgrade, which was undertaken by Barlow Projects, was botched and stopped in 2006. One of the three ovens is completely incapable of operating, and the other two are not 100% stable. The concerns being thrown around are how much money it will cost the city to get the facility up to speed.
This is a serious blemish on the future of waste-to-energy in Central Pennsylvania. There will be little incentive to build a waste-to-energy facility based upon what happened in Harrisburg. Even a brand new facility with the latest technology from the start would be hard to get through. Some people here do not even pay to have their waste collected at curbside for disposal in the landfill let alone having it incinerated in a tightly-controlled energy-from-waste facility. Instead, trash is smoldered, converted into micron-size airborne particles at pizza-oven temperatures in rusty 55-gallon oil drums scattered around backyards throughout the region, and I don't think the smoking ban applies to this kind of smoking.
The two working burners at Harrisburg are currently being operated by Covanta.
In many European countries such as Denmark, municipal governments handle all aspects of waste management and that includes the construction and operation of incineration plants. The system seems to work very well and offer an environmentally-sound and inexpensive option for the treatment of non-recyclable solid waste and production of energy. Denmark's biggest incineration plant, Vestforbraending, combusts 700,000 Mg of waste per year and heats the national capital (Copenhagen). However, Americans must not be ready for it yet.
Of course, the mainstream news media seems to be more interested in giving us the scoop on President Bush's colonoscopy (and for the 3 days afterwards) and the latest Paris Hilton trash than what is going on at the incinerator. So maybe no will ever know about this!
Plasma Gasification may be the new Waste-to-Energy
Plasma gasification has gained serious attention over the past four years. In 2003, when I first began learning about waste-to-energy facilities and processes, plasma was very experimental and little was widely known about it. Today there are numerous pilot plants in operation, there seem to be countless companies involved with it, and cities are considering it as a method to deal with waste.
Currently, "waste-to-energy" is practically synonymous with incineration - at least in the United States. Incineration is mature technology and it works, but because the combustion is taking place in excess air, the furnaces must be very large and the subsequent emissions control devices must be very large as well to deal with the high volumes of flue gases.
Plasma facilities can be built in very small spaces. Having small plasma gasification plants spread about a city instead of a single large incinerator in the outlying area is very attractive. It would reduce truck traffic and provide a greater opportunity to utilize waste heat from the WTE process in the form of district heating and cooling. Smaller buildings with shorter chimneys can be used and this reduces the impact on the landscape which creates greater public support (not to say that incinerators such as Brescia (Italy), Spittelau (Austria), Tokyo-Minato, and others look bad! )
If the envionmental and economic performance of plasma gasification lives up to its ideals, I believe that it will eventually replace incineration as the de-facto process in thermal waste-to-energy operations.
Plasma Gasification of waste to begin in Ottawa
Plasco Energy Group will be starting a test facility for plasma-arc gasification of municipal solid waste at the Trail Road landfill near Ottawa, Canada.
Canadian cities such as Ottawa and Toronto have been looking at waste-to-energy technology in order to deal with the waste that is currently either landfilled in Canada or shipped to the United States.
Traditional waste-to-energy facilities use incineration, where waste is aerobically combusted at about 1000-1500°C. Plasma facilities use an electrical "plasma torch" to ionize a gas - creating temperatures in the range of 10,000°C. The plasma heats the waste up in an anaerobic environment - therefore it does not burn. It is chemically decomposed into elements and simple compounds such as carbon monoxide and silicon dioxide. The resulting gases are also rich in carbon monoxide, hydrogen and methane meaning that they are rich in energy. This gas along with the waste heat from the gasification process goes towards the plant's energy output.
The plasma process offers advantages such as the fact that it is so hot that less dioxin-like compounds aree produced, and the lack of excess air reduced nitrogen oxide production. The high temperatures can increase the volatization of heavy metals, though. The "ash" is not the fine powder form that we are all familiar with - it is a black glass-like substance made up mostly of silica, alumina, and other metal oxides.
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
