In Tulsa, Oklahoma, everyone is talking trash.
There are debates in Tulsa concerning what to do with the city's trash. Most of it is currently incinerated at the W.B. Hall Resource Recovery Facility, and the resulting heat is sold to Sunoco for refinery use, ofsetting the use of OIL for making steam. The cost of landfilling trash compared with the cost of incinerating it is much lower (obviously, this is in Oklahoma, not New England! ). Tulsa residents are not happy with having to pay higher trash disposal rates than surrounding areas.
Landfill, or incinerate? You should continue to burn that trash...because the energy output of the Hall RRF is going to the oil refinery, where it is directly replacing the combustion of petroleum products. This offsets greenhouse gas emissions and it reduces the burning of oil products to make steam, which means there will be more oil to be turned into gasoline to drive our beloved cars, distillate to heat our homes, propane to fire up our barbeques, etc. In this case the WTE facility really does reduce our reliance on foreign oil, unlike electricity-only incinerators where they replace coal - meaning better environmental performance but coal is a domestic resource.
Is $15 too much to pay per month to have your trash hauled away? I think that is pretty darn cheap! Trash is the consequence of our resource-guzzling consumer society and we have to either deal with it responsibly (reuse, compost, recycling, WTE), or stop its production (source reduction).
