Garbage and Sewage Sludge are "economic commodities" and WtE plants work very much like coal-fired power plants; but burns much cleaner. The difference is the fuel. Waste to Energy plants use garbage—not coal—to fire an industrial boiler.

The same steps are used to make electricity in a WtE plant as in a coal-fired power plant: (1) The fuel is burned, releasing heat. (2) The heat turns water into steam. (3) The high-pressure steam turns the blades of a turbine generator to produce electricity. (4) A utility company sends the electricity along power lines to homes, schools, and businesses. Incinerators burn waste at high temperatures and the heat is used to generate steam. Steam can then drive electric turbines &/or heat water for a district heating scheme. Where both forms of energy are produced, this is known as a combined heat and power (CHP) scheme.

The steam generated by incineration energy is expanded in the turbines, producing electricity. Then it passes through the heat exchanger of the district heating system, where it is heating the water to 80°C–115°C while condensing. In a closed cycle, the water flows back to the incineration heat exchanger and is transformed to steam again. For every 200,000 tonnes of waste incinerated, 145,000 MWh of electrical energy and 540,000 MWh of district heating are produced.

Trucks &/or trains deliver garbage to the "tipping floor" where garbage is sorted. After incineration waste is reduced to blocks of dense cooled ashes. Incinerators reduce overall volume of waste by up to 90% and mass waste by 75%. The plant uses natural gas and burns garbage to produce steam that drives a turbine generator to produce electricity. About ј of the power is used to run in-plant needs with the rest being sent to the power grid. As mentioned, Sudbury already owns GSHi who already owns a "Smart Power Grid."

Modern incinerators burn garbage at extreme high temperatures and use pollution control devices to limit emissions. Pollution controlled devices use sophisticated air pollution control technology and highly skilled workers with engineering degrees run them, so many of these jobs are very high paying. Certified plant operators must also keep up with the frequent changes in State-of-the-Art technologies and regulations.

Gases are treated in three stages before they are emitted through a stack, and this is called point source pollutants. A filter removes poisonous particles and a Catalytic Reduction stage destroys dioxins and petroleum like substances, and all emissions would be well within provincial pollution standards.

It takes 1 tonne of garbage compared to 1/4 tonne of coal to produce the same amount of energy. However one tonne of garbage burns much cleaner than ј tonne of coal, thus garbage is a cleaner stream of fuel. A barrel of oil costs as much as 70 $. A tonne of garbage generates as much electricity as a barrel of oil; and Ontario is a veritable Middle East of garbage, pumping out 13 million tonnes a year. Therefore, you can think of garbage as a mixture of energy-rich fuel.

Burning one tonne of trash thus avoids mining a quarter tonne of coal or importing or producing one barrel of oil. Taking into account both of these factors means that WtE plants reduces GHG emissions by an estimated 2.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide per tonne of trash burned.

Ontario's total annual electricity consumption was 151 billion kWh in 2006. Ontario emits 203 milltion tones (megatonnes or MT) of greenhouse gases per year; 28% of the national total. To meet Kyoto targets by 2012, it requires cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent by 2020 relative to 1990 levels, and getting to 80 per cent reductions by 2050.

The current flurry of federal eco-spending announcements cannot paper over the lack of a national climate change plan or how the federal government's poor performance on the climate change file is jeopardizing both our international reputation and the environment.

No one is saying this will be easy. Ontario's greenhouse gas emissions come from our coal-fired electricity plants, from our cars and trucks, from heating our houses, from factories and farms. We are indeed "addicted" to fossil fuels, even though we know that burning them blankets the Earth with heat-trapping gases. And due to the lack of any real action to date, Ontario's emissions have grown 15 per cent since 1990.

However, we continue to lag behind our global competitors, including the U.S., Spain, Germany, Italy, France and even India, China and Panama in terms of our investment in renewable energy. Canada ranked only 11th in the Ernst & Young Renewable Energy Investment Attractiveness Index in Q3 2006. These countries invest in low-impact renewable energy because of its multiple environmental, social and economic benefits. They see beyond the fossil fuel era and want to ensure they have a mature and competitive renewable energy industry in place when the inevitable transition to renewable energy comes later this century.

The good news is that the faster that Ontario acts, the less it will cost. And given that our energy use is already much more wasteful than other industrialized countries like Germany, the U.K. and Japan that use half the energy per dollar of output that Canada does, many of the solutions will save us money as we burn less fossil fuel in more efficient homes, power plants, vehicles and workplaces.

If 15 of the 31 million tonnes of trash were combusted (the remaining 16 million tonnes recycled) we would produce 8 billion Kwh of electricity, greater than all other sources of renewable energy, and reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions by 42-million tonnes of carbon dioxide PER YEAR!

A WtE cogeneration plant with flue gas condensers can recover up to 98% of the energy from the waste it burns. Up to about 30% of that comes out as electricity, the rest as heat. This heat is usable as heat or it can be converted into chilled water using an absorption chiller, reducing strain on the grid in summer due to air conditioning load.

In 100 pounds of typical garbage, more than 90 pounds can be burned as fuel to generate electricity at a power plant. Those fuels include paper, plastics, and yard waste. A tonne of garbage generates about 525 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough energy to heat a typical office building for one day. Burning 1500 tonnes a days produces enough electricity to power 28,000 homes. Burning 2250 tonnes of garbage a day generates 55 megawatts (MW) of electricity; and a megawatt is 1 million watts of power, enough to light at least 10 thousand light bulbs at the same time.

Currently, the largest garbage gulping incinerator in the world is capable of burning 4,500 tonnes a day. Having 4 megawatt incinerators, 2 in each twin stack, would accommodate garbage from up to 5 million people a day. There are 12.5 million people in Ontario, 8 million in Quebec and 1.2 million in Manitoba, our two next bed neighbours. Having 10 mass burn incinerators, 5 in each stack, would accommodate the entire province of Ontario, although more stacks may be needed. Typically, 3 funances can feed one stack.

Having 10 burners would allow one big burner in each stack to be shut down for maintenance on a rotating basis without interrupting our 24/7/365 production schedule. Since rural towns in Ontario might not provide garbage due to inconvenient delivery or costs, we can accommodate garbage from other provinces. Having 8 of the 10 big burners in service would produce roughly 880 megawatts of electricity per day, every day.

With 20 big burners in play, we would scale up to accommodate more trash and cash and wisely become the "Incineration Capital of the World." A twenty burner diet would digest all of Canada's garbage and produce some 1980 megawatts per day, with 2 of 20 burners shut down for servicing on a ongoing rotating basis. Eighteen mass burners would incinerate 81,000 tonnes or more per day and, with proper digestion, produce roughly 8 tonnes of ash per day.

Bear in mind, emissions do increase not only during start-ups, shutdowns, or upsets in combustion conditions, but also during periods of less-than-optimal performance resulting from lack of maintenance, or simply as a result of facility aging.

The ash represents only 10% by volume of the original garbage. Landfilled ash does not give off the potent smelly greenhouse gas methane the way rotting garbage does. If you actually look at it using science and measure, what comes out of ash, what comes out of garbage, what’s emitted from ash, what’s emitted from garbage, you’ll actually conclude that you’d rather sit next to an ash landfill than a garbage landfill. Sudbury is 37 miles long and 17 miles wide; and has no shortage of space to store 100 years worth of accumulated ash.

There is more information on ash later in this portal, but in the meantime while you’re pondering what 100 million tonnes of ash would look like consider how many hundreds of millions of tonnes of slag and other industrial waste CVRD Inco (Inco) has stored on their wee property over the past 100+ years and they haven’t run out of room nor does it interfere with our city life!

If all Ontario garbage--&/or all of Canada's major cities garbage--were sent to Sudbury we would become the Saudi Arabia of recycling. Becoming an “Extreme Green Guerilla" would turn Sudbury into a powerhouse “Green Volt WasteWatt"" electricity producer. This extreme "Green" plan would create a "waste-based" energy producing manufacturing eco-economy.

Sudbury also has the oldest rock in North America, the "Sudbury Nickel Eruptive," which is located within the U-shaped "Cambrian Shield," also called the Precambrian Shield, Laurentian Shield, Bouclier Canadien (French), or Laurentian Plateauand, and a rock-faced "Mount Trashmore Monument" with my face on it could be constructed to recognize Sudbury's "eco-efficient "Green Status." [img]wink.gif" border="0[/img]

Additionally, or in the alternative, we need to get our architecturally designed WtE on a Canadian stamp! And I’m not kidding you about that one! There are 5 Power Plants on stamps in other countries. Our 21st century architecturally designed humanistic "WasteWatt Power Plant" will be the first in Canada!

Five hundred Waste to Energy facilities can be found from Sweden to Spain and from Britain to Hungary, as it's illegal to landfill anything combustible in most of Europe. Sweden has been a leader in using the energy generated from incineration over the past 30 years.

This State-of-the-Art incinerator near Malmo, Sweden, supplies 40 per cent of the city's electricity and heat

Japan has 193 WtE Power Plants while the rest of Asia have many more. Today, in the U.S., there are 98 WtE plants in 29 states that generate enough electricity to supply almost 3 million households. In fact, Americans throw away enough wood and paper every year to heat 5 million homes for 200 years. The largest WtE plant in the U.S. is located in Detroit, a mere 400 air shed miles from Sudbury. The plant handles 4,000 tonnes a day and 3 furnaces operate using 1 smoke stack.

Currently there are only 8 major municipal incinerators operating in the United Kingdom. These treat just 7% of the Country's municipal solid waste. In comparison to Europe this is very poor. For example, Switzerland and Belgium incinerate over 50% of their municipal solid waste, France, Sweden and Denmark over 40%, and the Netherlands and Norway over 30%.

Nothing speaks as eloquently as an example, and these WtE plants are proof that such plants do work well. European cities such as Amsterdam and Vienna have such advanced garbage incinerators that you can walk by them in a central neighbourhood and not realize what they are. We need to copycat this trend-true low carbon economy and earth-worthy direction, for in ecological terms; our sacred lands just can't afford another century like the past one.

All Ontario garbage would be trucked in while the rest of Canada's garbage would come by rail. Sudbury is starving for jobs and this "Green Acres" Philosophy would create "a pathway out of poverty” by producing over 2000+ new "Green Collar" jobs, not to mention free electricity. Toronto sends some 100+ trucks a day to Michigan and that alone is 100 truck driver jobs. Overall, there would be 1400+ jobs in transportation. In 2005, Ottawa produced enough garbage to fill 25,000 transports. Hamilton did the same. Toronto is 5 times the size of Ottawa! These three cities would produce 175,000 transport loads full of of garbage.

Reverse supply chain logistics--which means back-hauling products--would return "Made in Sudbury" finished goods manufactured from recycled waste to markets instead of sending trucks back empty, which reduces manufacturer transportation costs. Spin off jobs would be created in the truck fleet management, maintenance and service industry, while plant construction jobs would be in the hundreds.

All cities would pay us "tipping fees" to take their garbage, and current fees range from 40 to 100 $ per tonne; and fees at some southern Ontario metro dumps are now $150 a tonne. When seen from this prospective; "one man's garbage is definitely another man's Gold." By turning "Garbage into Gold," this is venture would produce "Real Gold" not "Fools Gold," and ensure that the waste isn’t, well, a total waste.

This scheme is a pathway to not only yielding environmental gains but also economic success.

A trash incinerator is the only kind of power station which gets paid to accept the fuel it burns! And with local construction and demolition (CD) materials becoming part of the incoming material stream, we get more infeed fuel for free! Recovering the Btu value of it is a tremendous step above sending it to a landfill.

To operate at peak efficiency, the combustors need to be fed constantly and run 24 hours a day, seven days a week; hence, they thrive on waste. To feed their addiction they need waste; they demand waste, and they love “getting wasted” on “refuse-derived fuel;” otherwise the burners are “starving for trash.” In order to incorporate a guaranteed “flow control," cities sign what is called a "put-or-pay" agreement. These commit communities to deliver a prescribed amount of waste to the incinerator each day, week, month or year, at a fixed rate, and should they fail to do so they have to pay the scheduled amount anyway.

Thus, with capital guaranteed, input guaranteed, and market for output guaranteed; building an incinerator and turning trash into treasure is one of the least risky, most subsidized, guaranteed business venture in the world!

It pays to have "enviro-vision" and an "eco-magination. I have it, and Sudbury needs to immediately become an "eco-holic" by turning these "wastes into resources." Moreover, we’re in the midst of World War IV; the War on Waste. We are in a serious “waste race" with other communities; for it's just a matter of time before some next bed neighbour wises up and adopts this idea and all the jobs along with it.

And, if you're even half as much an "eco-geek" as I am, you’d already know that this is not dirty tech; this "energy recovery scheme" is the future of "Green Tech." Taking even just a percentage of Ontario's landfill-destined “waste stream" and converting it into "value-added products" and "smart heat" would be "eco-topia!"

For example, Covanta Energy’s WtE plant in Hempstead, on Long Island NY, burns about 900,000 tonnes of garbage a year, and creates electricity to run the plant, and power 65,000 homes. There are some 73,000 residential units in Sudbury and over 8 million tonnes of gold (trash) within a 4 hour radius of Sudbury that right now nobody wants!

Can we really afford another missed "golden" opportunity for our city!

The plant would cost 1 billion to 2 billion $ to build, and more, if 20 big burners were installed. Toronto just wasted 220+ million $ buying the mammoth Green Lane “megafill” site near London Ontario, and that money could've, and should've went into this project.

Toronto decided to defile a farming community by both increasing a landfill and increasing truck traffic from a few to a constant stream as they trundle their garbage along farming roads, pumping diesel fumes and noise into the air, and compounding the traffic problems along suicide alley. The leachate from this landfill will seep into agricultural land, the very land that feeds us. The methane gas the landfill emits will pollute their air and increase greenhouse gases.

Meanwhile, Premier McGuinty wants to spend "40 billion $" on nuclear energy, which creates a dangerous lifetime supply of nuclear waste, next to no new jobs, and zero jobs in the north.

Nuclear plants will, in effect, block the development of safe, green energy. McGuinty fails to mention our current fleet of aging reactors cost Ontario ratepayers twice what they were promised to cost and lasted half as long. He shrugs off the 350,000 people displaced by the Chernobyl nuclear accident as if they are a fluke not to be repeated and bizarrely holds up the near catastrophic melt down at Three Mile Island nuclear plant as some virtuous success of the technology.

According to him, we shouldn't sweat creating more radioactive nuclear waste because our children's generation will figure out how to deal with it. But solving climate change with nuclear generation is akin to curing cancer with the plague. Nevertheless, we know the province has 40 billion $ to spend on energy production and this project would cost no where near that.

The federal government has "billions" to spend on fighting Greenhouse Gas. This project would provide the best bang for its buck! Menhane gas is 24.5 times more powerful than CO2 as a GHG. We'd wipe out 42+ million tonnes of it with this mother of all net energy producing idea!

State-of-the-Art Waste to Energy Plant in Italy - This plant won the best in the world in 2006

A third party "could" operate our WtE plant and would also make a financial investment reducing start up costs. This third party would also become a major ratepayer to Sudbury's tax roll.

Acquiring "smart garbage" would also require the government to complete the four-lanes of Highway 69 to Toronto sooner rather than later due to the increased truck traffic. The incinerator could produce enough ash to back fill the construction! Ontario is also in need of electricity, and not only would we close every leaky stinky landfill, but Hydro One would also receive a portion of the hydro we produce.

The province(s) and cities could eliminate recycling education and recycling programs and apply those funds to this project and the tipping fees we would charge. Recycling is a good thing, but it costs money. Money that could go for road resurfacing or social programs is being absorbed by increasing disposal costs.

Once the waste to energy plant is up and running the methane gas being produced at the Kingsway Landfill could be converted into compressed Natural Gas (CNG) to fuel light and heavy-duty vehicles like our city transit! Vehicles powered by CNG offer several environmental benefits, including reduced noise levels and cleaner emissions compared to diesel powered vehicles. CNG powered vehicles also have 40 to 50% lower maintenance costs!

Other "eco-fusion-options" is a Plasma Converter System that seems like something right out of "The Jetsons:" plasma, vaporization, temperatures 3 times hotter than the Sun!

It works a little like the big bang, only backward--you get nothing from something. You put the waste in the reactor and you get out the syngas. That’s it. There's no smoke, no flames, no ash, no pollution of any kind—all that’s left is syngas, the fuel source, and the molten obsidian-like material. Waste destruction at the speed of lightning with energy to share!

With 20 of these systems we could accommodate 146 million tonnes a year and zap all of Canada’s solid waste, medical waste and human sewage! Gasification is not just environmentally friendly, it’s a good business decision.

Star Tech sn’t the only company using plasma to turn waste into a source of clean energy. A handful of start-ups—Geoplasma, Recovered Energy, PyroGenesis, EnviroArc and Plasco Energy, among others—have entered the market in the past decade. But Longo, who has worked in the garbage business for four decades, is perhaps the industry’s most passionate founding father.

Plasma is simply a gas (air) that the Converter ionizes so it becomes an effective electrical conductor and produces a lightning-like arc of electricity that is the source of the intense energy transferred to the waste material as radiant energy. The arc in the plasma plume within the vessel can be as high as 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

When waste materials are subjected to the intensity of the energy transfer within the vessel, the excitation of the waste's molecular bonds is so great that the waste material's molecules break apart into their elemental components (atoms). It is the absorption of this energy by the waste material that forces the waste destruction and elemental dissociation. The Plasma Converter is computer controlled, easy to use and operates at normal atmospheric pressure, very safely and quietly.

This system can safely and economically destroys wastes, no matter how hazardous or lethal. In doing so, the system protects the environment and helps to improve the public health and safety.

The System achieves closed-loop elemental recycling to safely and irreversibly destroy Municipal Solid Waste, organics and inorganics, solids, liquids and gases, hazardous and non-hazardous waste, industrial by-products and also items such as "e-waste," medical waste, chemical industry waste and other specialty wastes while converting many of them into useful commodity products that can include metals and a synthesis-gas called Plasma Converted Gas (PCG)™.

Among the many commercial uses for PCG, it can be used to produce "green power electricity," Gas To Liquid (GTL) fuels such as ethanol, synthetic diesel fuel and other higher alcohol fuels. Hydrogen, for use and sale, can also be separated from the PCG synthesis gas mixture. Startech is the only publicly traded Waste to Energy plasma arc technology company in the world. They have three 5 ton/day installations in operation, with a number of other plants in various stages of implementation. A 200 ton/day plant being built in Panama and will be the largest such plant in the world.

Another "eco-fusion-option" is the biomass gasification process that pours hot sand over ground-up materials that are no bigger than a softball. The sand pours over that surface area, rapidly heats that biomass and converts it to a gas that is substitutable for natural gas. There are no emissions from this process.

Unsorted garbage is dumped into a sorting machine that rips the green bags open, and chops the trash into smaller pieces. The garbage is fed onto conveyer belts which take the material to a sorting machine. Magnets pull out metals and push out aluminum.

What's left goes in stages through three large, enclosed tanks. Over a period of 40 days, anaerobic bacteria metabolize paper and food scraps and converts them into a soup of smaller molecules, which is then fermented into methane and carbon dioxide by other anaerobic organisms.

What's left, after the methane and carbon dioxide have been siphoned off, are particles of glass, plastic and fine particles of peat that look like coffee grounds. The material is put through a fine screen that filters out the glass and plastic for recycling.

The peat-like material goes through a final process to remove the heavy metals. Subbor executives say that for every 100 kilograms of garbage that goes through the process, 50 kilograms of biogas, 30 kilograms of recycled glass and metals and 20 kilograms of high-grade peat are produced. Subbor is "Canadian tech" and has a plant up and running in Guelph.

Having a combination of systems would be ideal. The biomass gasification process would produce the natural gas needed to operate the WtE plant; we would have a completely self sustaining operation. However, this system is a 40-day process and not suitable as our only source of ridding earth of the large volumes of garbage that we would be handling.

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[ 09 July 2007: Message edited by: Sudbury ]