Cutting jobs is hard work. Creating jobs is genius!

Today we are limited only by our imagination yet those who can imagine a new reality have always been outnumbered by those who cannot. In the beginning, a new idea always has only one believer, and I believe it’s time to reinvent our energy and waste disposal policies. Sudbury could be, should be, and would be a solution to these problems but sadly we lack the vision and leadership in this city, province and country to get it done.

A leader does not solely rely on hand-me-down economies and yesterday's wisdom, but quickly attains a deep understanding of capacity building techniques and key drivers in economic development, and builds on this understanding. A leaders job is to raise the city, province or country's IQ, to be alert to future trends, be able to interpret what they see, and provide future-based answers. This is the hallmark raw ingredient in the makeup of leadership, for in the age of revolution, the future is not more of the past; it's profoundly different than the past.

Though you cannot touch it, smell it, hear it, see it, or taste it, you can sense, think and feel innovation. Innovation is not a dirty word and preserving the status quo is not a quality trait of leaders. Innovation is best described as a pervasive attitude that allows you to see beyond the present and into the future. The search for "Green Technologies" and products is thus presented as a key motor of future economic engines, and global markets for such technology is forecasted to reach 640 billion $ U.S. by 2010. This portal file is a good primer for those just learning about the industry.

While most of us think of waste disposal as an earthbound problem, the most common ways we get rid of garbage indirectly send tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Although recycling and composting in Canada currently divert about 40% of solid waste from disposal, the other 60% is disposed in landfill sites or in a few cities burned in incinerators. Both of these latter options result in the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that trap and retain heat from the sun, creating a warming effect on Earth; but incineration produces less greenhouse gas (GHG) than landfilling.

Overall, waste management in Canada directly produces about 3.5 per cent of the nation's total greenhouse-gas emissions. The lion's share of this percentage comes from landfill sites, where organic material buried deep under layers of waste and earth decomposes without oxygen, creating methane. Methane, which comprises about 50-60% of landfill gas volume, is about 24.5 times more potent--mass per mass--as a Greenhouse Gas than carbon dioxide!

Although 41 landfills in Canada recover methane and flare it or use it to generate electricity, "most" of it is released into the atmosphere.

Burning waste, on the other hand, pumps out only one per cent of the nation's total carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions. Although carbon dioxide is the most prevalent greenhouse gas, methane and nitrous oxide are much more potent—with 24.5 and 310 times as much global-warming potential, respectively. All three gases are targeted in the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emission from the most industrialized nations by 2010.

Sudbury owns Greater Sudbury Utility (GSU), which includes Greater Sudbury Hydro Inc (GSHi), but they do not produce one watt of electricity. They simply buy electricity from the province and resell it to local customers. The new landfill gas collection system at the Kingsway dump will soon produce some electricity; but the terms of the 20 year "Landfill Gas to Energy" contract is an extremely bad deal for the city.

Sudbury ratepayers spent over 10 million $ developing the waste utilization plant. The Ministry of Energy agreed to purchase electricity at 11 cents per kilowatt for 20 years, 3 cents above the assumed market price of 8 cents. However, this poorly negotiated power proposal stinks, as electricity rates will not remain at 8 cents over the next 20 years and when it reaches 12 cents we’re losing money.

Based on the reported average 500,000 $ a year rate of return, this project will not turn a profit for more than 25+ years, given the 10 million+ $ investment. Annual operating costs must be deducted from the 500,000 $ revenue source, which extends the payback period. This "methane to market" program is also a partnership with Genco, a subsidiary of GSU, who profits off this venture, which delays the payback period even more.

This project was just a money grab by the Liberal controlled Ministry of Energy who took full advance of the incompetence of Doug Craig and GSHi. This project provides no quick fix to the Greenhouse Gas being emitted into the air; and by their own admission, gases will continue to spew for 25+ years; and we’re now stuck in this deal no matter how lopsided the terms.

A bioreactor landfill is an innovative landfill management strategy called "enhanced or controlled" landfilling to manage solid waste. A bioreactor landfill operates to rapidly transform and degrade organic waste. This bioreactor concept differs from the traditional “dry tomb” municipal landfill approach.

Simply put, bioreactor landfill technology accelerates the biological decomposition of organic wastes in a landfill by promoting conditions necessary for the microorganisms that degrade the waste. The increase in waste degradation and stabilization is accomplished through the addition of liquid and air to enhance microbial processes. By efficiently designing and operating a landfill, the life of a landfill can be extended by as much as 20 years.

A bioreactor landfill is not just a single design and will correspond to the operational process invoked. There are three different general types of bioreactor landfill configurations:

Aerobic - In an aerobic bioreactor landfill, leachate is removed from the bottom layer, piped to liquids storage tanks, and re-circulated into the landfill in a controlled manner. Air is injected into the waste mass, using vertical or horizontal wells, to promote aerobic activity and accelerate waste stabilization.

Anaerobic - In an anaerobic bioreactor landfill, moisture is added to the waste mass in the form of re-circulated leachate and other sources to obtain optimal moisture levels. Biodegradation occurs in the absence of oxygen (anaerobically) and produces landfill gas. Landfill gas, primarily methane, can be captured to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and for energy projects.

Hybrid (Aerobic-Anaerobic) - The hybrid bioreactor landfill accelerates waste degradation by employing a sequential aerobic-anaerobic treatment to rapidly degrade organics in the upper sections of the landfill and collect gas from lower sections. Operation as a hybrid results in the earlier onset of methanogenesis compared to aerobic landfills.

In the bioreactor process the release of Greenhouse Gas emissions is reduced both by higher and quicker recovery rates of landfill gas and from offsetting fossil fuel use with landfill gas energy.

Waste decomposition results in the conversion of biodegradable solid waste into gas, thereby creating additional landfill space. In conventional landfills, this settlement usually occurs after landfill closure when it is too late to use the space. By accelerating the decomposition process, new landfill space is created sooner, which may be reused for additional waste placement. Recycling valuable landfill space could extend the landfill life by 20%.

Environmental Control Systems' (ECS) aerobic landfill technology uses a patented process that stabilizes waste far faster than traditional anaerobic methods, thus minimizing risk, enhancing revenues and extending the life of the facility.

Rather than waiting for the organic compounds to degrade naturally, which can take up to 30 years, ECS treats the material by injecting air and moisture directly into the waste. Degradation takes place in just one to three years, and produces a non-toxic material that can be mined, recovered or reused. That, in turn, can free up an additional 80 to 90 percent of airspace, which eliminates the need for new permits and expansions and ensures a longer-lasting facility that generates more profits.

The City of Calgary has constructed a full-scale pilot project consisting of a 100,000 tonne cell, which will operate under anaerobic and aerobic conditions. The landfill maybe mined at a later date to recover space. A landfill in Ste-Sophie Quebec and the Laflиche landfill in Moose Creek Ontario also operate as bioreactors.

As you can see, Sudbury clearly suffers from a serious lack of logic, ambition and imagination, and as I said during my mayoral campaign, we cannot build what we cannot imagine; and imagination is what engineers the future. Sudbury can no longer afford to sit back and just polish yesterday's economic apple, or be involved in toothless projects; we must look beyond conventional recipes for business sustainability by planting new apple trees to grow a "wisdom economy" for our future.

"Ingenuity is unlimited," and Sudbury needs to push the frontiers of technology and become a pioneer in electricity technology. This is the very essence of learning to identify and create opportunities that spring from the emerging trends Lens; for the height of insanity is doing things the same way and expecting a different result.

We also know the threat posed by global warming and climate change. The question is: what are we doing about it?

We do much to prepare our children for the future, but are we doing enough to prepare the future for our children?

I believe we must do both.

When our descendants look back at the first part of the twenty first century, we want them to be able to say: "That's when they began to take the degradation of the natural environment seriously." And we would like them to be able to see that we took serious steps to halt and revere this process.

Thus, we are at "War with Waste" and if we fight the great fight we will change our world one trash can at a time! If we are to win this war and, if recycling is going to survive, and even prosper, we need to do more--much more than we are doing today. Recycling refers to the recovery of dry materials from the waste stream that can be incorporated into new uses, but waste prevention is an entirely different animal. "Zero waste" means not making the waste in the first place. The ideal situation is to create no waste at all; but that’s simply impossible to do. And although modern techniques can greatly reduce the risk of environmental damage, "no method" of waste disposal is entirely harmless to the environment.

To make the right environmental choices, we need to understand how our natural environment works, and how resources are affected by the things we do. How we produce energy, and how we consume it, are critical issues in today's world, as Climate change is tied to the way people use energy. As support of ecological awareness continues to grow, we can no longer be afraid to shatter norms and old school traditions; we must take a stand against outdated waste disposal methods and the outdated dream of blind over-consumption by "white picket fencers."

The cornerstone of my War on Waste strategy rests on principles that I call "Green Acres;" a groovy "Green Philosophy" of relationships which recognizes the importance of valuing renewable resources and a "menu of methods" that would establish a comprehensive "National Municipal Solid Waste Policy," with a mission of building bridges between climate, science, community and commodity; all of which makes "Enviro-$ense!"

In our society, waste and anything associated with waste carries a stigma. We waste opportunities; we waste time; we waste money; we waste an education; and we even waste our minds. Waste is certainly not something that is considered useful and, in the final analysis, not something with which we want to be or should be associated. But when it comes to "Solid Waste" that stigma doesn't apply. Canadian waste-management companies bring in 4.1 billion $ a year, and sales of recycled products bring in 336 million $ a year!

Sudbury was once known as a "wasteland" and it’s high time we regain that status; but this time, in a 21st century ”Green Acres” state-of-the-practice fashion. Today, "Green" is going mainstream and by becoming the new "Green Giant" Sudbury would rise to the top by taking a leadership role in the challenge of a cleaner environment while making "progress profitable!" With a firm commitment to a healthier, safer environment without sacrificing performance, Sudbury would begin producing “Green Waste Watt” electricity and start manufacturing and marketing the "Green Acres" line of environmentally safe products; and all products would bear the government's "Green Seal" of approval.

So, here are some “outside the white picket fence” "eco-options" from my "Waste-ology Lab" and a detail-oriented encyclopedic like blueprint and "ecologically business plan" sure to clean up the environment and make "$udbury Green and Famou$." To achieve this victory, we need to understand technology with a depth of maturity that Canadians have never shown before. Thus, what is needed to pass the Northern Life and Sudbury Star front page test is a greater understanding about recycling and incinerators.

Recycling begins in the mind, and, importantly, incinerating garbage is a form of recycling. In Ontario, garbage disposal is a burning question. In much of the rest of the world it's just a matter of burning. Canadians do manage to recycle 40% of our garbage, though, sometimes quite creatively. One reason: Trash is big business; and business is good!

The terms reuse and recycle have specific meanings, but they are often confused, switched, and misused, especially in commerce, but in short; Recycle, why waste a good thing! Also keep in mind the concept of "cycle" in the term "recycle". You “close the loop” when you buy items or packaging made from recycled materials. They have now come full-circle: from bag or bin to a manufacturer, to the store shelf, and back to your home. And after using the item, you can start the loop again by saving it for the local recycling program. When you buy recycled, markets are created and a use is assured for recyclables being collected in your community and in thousands of others. Manufacturers will respond by continuing to use recyclables in their products.

“Incineration” is a generic term that encompasses a wide range of options that differ markedly in technology, economics and environmental impact. Mass burn is typically a low efficiency approach. While it eliminates large amounts of refuse, little energy is recovered. Incineration techniques have become more effective and the resulting emissions of hazardous substances to the atmosphere are far better controlled than they were in the 1980s. In Sweden, for example, the amount of waste delivered to incineration plants has doubled since the 1980’s, whereas the energy extraction has increased four-fold while stringent clean air regulations are being met.

“Waste-to-Energy” (WtE) or “Energy-from-Waste” (EfW) in its strictest sense refers to any waste treatment that creates energy in the form of electricity or heat from a waste source that would have been disposed of in landfill, also called “Energy Recovery (ER).” Every 700 megawatts produced replaces eight million barrels of oil and powers 700,000 homes.

The modern Waste to Energy facilities which are being built today are marvels of both engineering and architecture. As energy prices continue to escalate, our Waste to Energy plant would be a welcome alternative.

The meaning of the term “waste” can be changed over time. In the natural world, there is no such thing as waste. Nature efficiently recycles materials through a very complex ecological process. Our industrial processes have not yet been developed to this level of efficiency or complexity.

“Waste is the result of industrial societies organized as open systems operating in a predatory mode with respect to their environment. The word "waste", through Old French g(u)ast, comes from the Latin vastus which originally meant an uninhabited and uncultivated expanse of land (as in the English vast), that nowadays we call wilderness or, more ideologically, the environment.

By extension the word meant land that had been rendered uncultivated and uninhabited or sparsely populated as a result of war, or predatory use, which we now call environmental degradation. By further extension, in the eighteenth century, the word waste took as well the meaning of a superfluous and lavish abundance of something and, a century later, the meaning of worthless surplus material; such as the extra sheets of good but now worthless paper left after a printing run.

It is only in comparatively recent times, essentially towards the beginning of the industrial revolution, that the word came to mean the useless products of any industrial process from which no further economic value can be generated and, that therefore, must be rejected somewhere in a waste land, a tip, or a dump, nowadays commonly referred to as a landfill.

Waste produced by the domestic, industrial and commercial sectors of the community can be broadly classified into two streams: Solid Wastes and Liquid Wastes. This Portal file examines the potential for energy generation from both streams. In addition, gaseous by-products of industries associated with the extraction and refining of fossil fuels and minerals are also used to produce energy, yielding both financial and environmental benefits. Heat, another by-product of many industrial processes, can also represent a pollutant when released into the environment.

In some instances there is the potential for some of this heat to be captured and "recycled" to increase process efficiency, or it may be profitably used for local heating needs, or even converted into electricity for on-site use, such as in fertilizer manufacturing plants or Waste to Energy Plants.

Wastes include: sewage sludge and effluent; animal wastes; food processing residues; and industrial effluents. “Gaseous” wastes include: methane from coal mining, oil refining, landfills and industrial waste gases. In Simple Words; solid wastes are any discarded, abandoned or considered waste-like materials. Solid wastes can be solid, liquid, semi-solid or containerized gaseous material.

A material is discarded if it is abandoned by being: disposed of; burned or incinerated, including being burned as a fuel for the purpose of recovering usable energy; or accumulated, stored or physically, chemically or biologically treated (other than burned or incinerated) instead of or before being disposed of. A material is disposed of if it is: Discharged, deposited, injected, dumped, spilled, leaked or placed into or on any land or water so that such material or any constituent thereof may enter the environment or be emitted into the air or discharged into groundwater or surface water.

Now the reason it is extremely profitable to wring out waste is that there is quite an astonishing amount of it. Indeed in the North American economy, the material that we extract from the planet, that we mobilize for economic purposes, that process, move around and ultimately dispose of, totals about 20 times your body weight per person per day. So worldwide this resource flow is in the order of a half-trillion tonnes per year!

And what happens to all this material?

Well, only about 1% of it ends up in durable goods while the rest becomes waste. Our economic system is about 99% pure waste; and that’s a business opportunity knocking!

And when opportunity knocks; you open the door!

Sudbury has two 400 foot tall smoke stacks called "Twin Stacks." The stacks were built in 1928 and decommissioned after the 1247 foot tall Superstack was built in 1972. The "Twin Stacks Recycled Comeback" could create a massive "Eco-Industrial Science Park" consisting of 2 to 4, or more, "21st century State-of-the-Art Mega-Wattage Waste to Energy Incinerator Power Plants" that would green up the country and turn down the earth's thermostat by eliminating landfills and Greenhouse Gas emissions in several cities.

Our Twin Stacks are 4 to 5 times higher than stacks currently used in most incinerator applications, which would ensure emissions dispense over a greater distance. All new WtE plants must meet strict emission standards, hence, modern WtE plants are vastly different from incinerators of the past. On a burn versus bury basis, incinerators are the "engine of ingenuity" and the "ultimate wisdom" of recycling.

The former Twin Stack smelter's vast empty surrounding space and industrial location is the ideal place and drawing card for this Waste to Energy "Green Acres" business cluster venture. Business clustering involves having geographic concentrations of interdependent competitive firms and projects in related industries. Sudbury needs a cluster of firms and projects in order to bring to fruition a new and large-scale infrastructure of economic development.

Sudbury is geographically located 250 miles north of the already "taxed" smog filled air zone of Southern Ontario, and also near the geographical centre of Canada by road or rail.

The city has two Trans Canada Highways and both national railways passing through it and, without doubt, Sudbury is the "Crossroads of Canada;" something no other city can claim. One of the Trans Canada Highways is a mere one mile away from this former smelter while the other Trans Canada Highway bypass is 3 miles away. CP rail line is less than one half mile away.

Europe generating approximately 1.8 billion tonnes of waste per year. North America produces enough trash each day to fill 70,000 garbage trucks. Americans generated 236 million tons of garbage in 2003, about 4.5 pounds per person, per day, and roughly 130 million tons went to landfills; enough to cover a football field 703 miles high with garbage.

Canadians produce more garbage per person than just about any other country in the world. Garbage is a huge by-product of our general over-consumption. In Ontario, we produce about 13 million tonnes a year. The average person in Ontario generates a whole tonne of trash per year! On average, each person generates approximately 2.7 kg (or 5.95lbs) of garbage each day. Each year, after recycling, Ontario sends approximately 10 million tonnes of waste to landfills.

Ontario currently has just one "Energy from Waste" (EfW) facility in Brampton, although Kirkland Lake generates electricity by the incineration of waste largely composed of wood debris. There are over 10,000 landfills in Canada, and, together, Canadians produce more than 31 million tonnes of garbage each year. Picture 31 million average family cars piled on top of each other; that is roughly how much garbage Canadians produce.

Rather than looking at our production systems as one way and linear, we can redesign them to be cyclical, as in nature, where there is no such thing as “waste” and materials are kept in the production cycle.

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[ 09 July 2007: Message edited by: Sudbury ]