Ministry of Fire

Drug Disposal with Waste-to-Energy (no separate incinerator required!)

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 21:18:32 +0000

An article at Forbes.com states that a company called Capital Returns and others are collecting outdated and unused pharmaceuticals and burning them in some of the nation's waste-to-energy facilities.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 Everything from sensitive documents and outdated food to narcotics and counterfeit products are hauled to a WTE facility and dumped into the charging hopper.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 pot plants they collect from illegal 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 ..

Botched Incinerator Losing Steam

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 21:34:04 +0000

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,

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

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:22:48 +0000

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.

» Read more at Ottawa Citizen

WTE projects getting help from U.S. Government

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 15:20:08 +0000

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

Hawaiian Trash Haulers want to ship waste to U.S. Mainland

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:54:14 +0000

Some private trash haulers in Honolulu are looking to have waste barged to landfills in Washington State, to avoid having to pay the city the $92/ton tipping fee to use its H-Power WTE incinerator or landfill. They may pay $80/ton to have it landfilled in Washington instead.

The city is concerned about reductions in the flow of trash to the incinerator, which not only deals with waste locally but generates some 7% of the electricity on Oahu, very important in a state which burns fuel oil to make the majority of its electricity. With the barging proposal, even more fuel oil will be burnt - oil to ship the trash to the mainland and bury it in the Washington landfills. This shipping also produces carbon dioxide, the key greenhouse gas. Once in the landfill, it will produce fugitive methane emissions, another potent greenhouse gas.

If trash haulers need to make ends meet, they should be charging their customers a little bit more rather than sending boats full of trash across the ocean when that trash could be incinerated locally to produce energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A lot of recyclables are probably also in that waste. If people have to pay a little bit more per bag to get their trash taken away, maybe they will be willing to reduce and recycle more. Americans truly are spoiled when it comes to trash disposal. We sometimes make it TOO easy to get rid of things. Cheap isn't always better.

Hopefully the city of Honolulu succeeds in blocking the export of garbage from Hawaii.

» Company Could Ship Trash To Mainland By Summer (KITV/Honolulu)

Incinerator firms trying to burn old image

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:24:15 +0000

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...

Anaerobic Digestion gaining popularity in U.S.

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:03:16 +0000

A set of anerobic digestion facilities are proposed for North Carolina. The facilities will digest hog manure and food/biomass waste while using the resulting methane to generate electricity, most likely using reciprocating engines.

Widespread large-scale digestion for animal and biomass wastes is a fairly new concept in the United States, though it has been practiced in many areas of Europe for quite some time due to less access to cheap fossil fuels and stricter regulations on the disposal of wastes.

Fitting WTE in with Recycling

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 19:35:10 +0000

The State of Indiana is looking to update environmental legislation concerning the definition of recycling. The initial proposal may include waste-to-energy in the list of acceptable recycling technologies.

There was much opposition to this, people wanted to see waste-to-energy removed from the list of acceptable recycling options.

WTE vs. Recycling

While WTE is certain not the same as traditional material recycling methods, it is a form of recycling in that it recovers the energy from the waste which would otherwise be wasted when the waste is landfilled. It seems appealing to try to recycle everything, but sometimes that is not an environmentally-sensible solution. Many wastes would require more energy and resources to recycle than to remanufacture. These wastes are best dealt with using waste-to-energy technologies, including incineration. Is it more environmentally-sound to burn diesel fuel hauling the materials around for recycling, or incinerating them locally for energy production? It all depends on the materials, the processing they require, and the hauling distance.

To maximize recycling, one thing that can be done is that manufacturers can package their goods in recyclable containers, such as corrugated boxes and PETE instead of PVC plastic. PVC is nothing but trouble anyways, producing chloride that corrodes the furnaces and boilers of incinerators and forms extra dioxins under poor combustion conditions.

Efficient Incineration

If new incinerators are built, they should not be of the "electricity-only" variety because these units waste about 80% of the total energy input. It makes sense to site incinerators in urban areas where the waste is generated and a district heat demand is located. A mid-sized incinerator will simply throw away over 100 megawatts of heating power - heat that could be used. A waste-to-energy cogeneration plant with flue gas condensers can recover up to ..

C&D Debris Incineration in Maine

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 00:59:21 +0000

Bangor Daily News reports that an increase in the use of construction and demolition waste is favored for use as fuel in the state's biomass and waste-to-energy facilities.

C&D (construction and demolition) waste contains wood which is useful as fuel, but also contains other substances including but not limited to lots of PVC (vinyl siding, flooring, wallpaper, pipe, jacketed electrical cable, deck and fence materials, and packaging). The wood makes good fuel - but just about everything else in C&D waste is terrible fuel. Asphalt shingles will burn nicely, as long as they are mixed with a great deal of biomass in a WTE facility designed to combust municipal solid waste (better pollution control equipment than a basic biomass boiler; those crude oil refining residues are probably chock full of sulfur)

One of Maine's issues is with the importation of out-of-state C&D wastes. Haulers bring mixed waste in to be burnt, then when they get to the power plant the wood is burnt and the remainder must be landfilled. Legislators hope to enacte regulations to allow only WOOD to be accepted into the state for incineration.