So as you can see, there are numerous by-products that can be made in one location in this truly efficient recycling waste to energy "Green Acres" Philosophy. Nothing would be wasted.

After the sorting operation the garbage enters a hopper pit where a crane operator picks up about 1 tonne per scoop and dumps it into the combustor

As mentioned previously, Waste to Energy incineration has a number of outputs such as the ash and the emission to the atmosphere of combustion product gases. The high-temperature incinerator in a Waste to Energy plant burns most of the waste. All that is left is a substance called ash. Ash is the solid residue left over when something is burned. It’s like the ash left over from a wood fire in the bottom of a fireplace.

Bottom Ash means the ash residue remaining after combustion of solid waste or solid waste in combination with fossil fuel in a solid waste incinerator that is discharged through and from the grates, combustor or stoker. Fly ash means the ash residue from the combustion of solid waste or solid waste in combination with fossil fuel that is entrained in the gas stream of the solid waste incinerator and removed by the air pollution control equipment. Combined ash means the mixture of bottom ash and fly ash.

Waste to Energy plants produce two types of ash; incinerator fly ash (IFB) and incinerator bottom ash (IBA). The total amount of ash produced ranges from 10 to 25 percent by weight of the original quantity of waste, and the fly ash amounts to about 10 to 20 percent of the total ash. In a Waste to Energy plant, 2,000 pounds (one tonne) of garbage is reduced to 300–500 pounds of ash. Once burned, the ash turns to a hard concrete, and the heavy metals, like lead and cadmium, are bound within the ash.

The average person produces around 2,000 pounds of waste a year. If all this waste were landfilled, it would take more than two cubic yards of landfill space. That’s the volume of a box three feet long, three feet wide, and six feet high. If that waste were burned, the ash residue would fit into a box three feet long, three feet wide, but only nine inches high!

State-of-the-Art Waste to Energy Plant in Portugal

In the U.S., the EPA decides whether the ash is hazardous by conducting an extraction procedure toxicity test--known to its friends as EP tox. In the EP tox test dilute acetic acid is poured over ash samples, then they are shaken, and filtered. The leachate is tested for various pollutants. If the lead concentration is more than 2 milligrams per liter, the ash is officially hazardous.

Heavy metals such are lead are indestructible. Whatever heavy metals are put into an incinerator they come out either in the stack gases or in the ash. The more you clean them out of the gases, the more they show up in the ash. Primary sources of lead are batteries, solder, metal alloys, dyed plastics, and colored inks. Lead has been taken out of black newspaper inks, but it is still present in some colored inks.

The only way to keep an incinerator from putting out lead is to stop putting lead into it, either by banning the use of lead where substitutes are available--as in inks--or by recycling objects containing it--such as batteries. We would not be burning batteries and would deink all paper prior to incinerating it. We would burn very little, if any, plastic given the amount of finished products we could make with it and sell for profit.

If the ash is found to be hazardous, it can only be disposed of in landfills which are carefully designed to prevent pollutants in the ash from leaching into underground aquifers, but in testing over the past decade, no ash from a U.S. or European modern Waste to Energy plant has ever been determined to be a hazardous waste.

Ash that is safe can be reused for many applications, such as making cement blocks and even to make artificial reefs for marine animals. About one-third of all the ash produced is used in landfills as a daily or final cover layer, thus we could back haul it to cities for landfill cover material and for gas venting layer material. As stated previously, there are over 10,000 landfills in Canada.

Rubber and bottom ash can also be mixed with asphalt for road construction, made into rubber sand bags for flooding purposes, and "Enviro-Bricks." "With the solid look of a brick home, and the environmentally responsible aspect of mass recycling, Enviro-Bricks provide the answer to a very critical worldwide need." R40 insulation! The city could partner up with Rainbow or Browne's Concrete to make "Eco-Smart" Cement Blocks and "Enviro-Earth Bricks" or develop them on our own.

Researchers have found that bricks made from fly ash, fine ash particles captured as waste by coal power plants, may be even safer than predicted. Instead of leaching minute amounts of mercury as some researchers had predicted, the bricks apparently do the reverse, pulling minute amounts of the toxic metal out of ambient air.

Manufacturing clay brick requires kilns fired to high temperatures, which wastes energy, pollutes air and generates greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. In contrast, fly ash bricks are "self-cementing," flame resistant and manufactured at room temperature and cured in the open air. They conserve energy, cost less to manufacture, and don't contribute to air pollution or global warming.

Once colored and shaped, the bricks are similar to their clay counterparts, both in appearance and in meeting or exceeding construction-material standards. Coal fly ash and Waste to Energy fly ash are the same thing, thus different ash manufactured product could be established.

Fly and bottom ash is also used as a component in the production of "Flowable Fill" (also called controlled low strength material, or CLSM), which is used as self-leveling, self-compacting backfill material in many applications, including a sub base for parking lots and new asphalt road constuction, in lieu of compacted earth or granular fill. Therefore, the ash could be used to backfill the roadbed construction of the four lanes on highway 69 from Sudbury to just north of Parry Sound! Thus Sudbury would not be landfilling any ash for years to come given the volume of backfill the highway 69 project requires.

The most common method of ash management is disposal in landfill, either commingled with MSW or alone in an ash "monofill." A monofill is a landfill that contains only ash, no raw garbage. However, today, ash has become a beneficial by-product and using ash for the products just mentioned is a significant step “towards zero landfills." Excessive ash can also be stored in exhausted mines, if need be.

Some might say; I'm a total "ash-hole" for thinking up this whole garbage idea, but in truth, it's time to follow the "Green Brick Road" as this treasure trove of trash will turn "Garbage into Gold", is a "Building Block" to our future, and our "Pot of Gold" at the end of the rainbow! Others will be "Green with Envy" and this entire plan would create a truly "Solid" Waste Management system.

Modern incinerators are very different from the incinerators that were commonly used until a few decades ago. Old-type incinerators usually did not include a materials separation to remove hazardous or recyclable materials before burning, and tended to risk the health of the plant workers and the nearby residents, and most of them did not generate electricity.

Modern incinerators emit less air pollution than coal plants, but more than natural gas plants. The USEPA has characterized modern incinerators as "producing electricity with less environmental impact than almost any other source of electricity."

State-of-the-Art Waste to Energy Plant in the Netherlands

Waste to Energy plants have a kind of built-in anti-pollution device, as its furnace burns at such high temperatures--1,800 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit--many complex chemicals naturally break down into simpler, less harmful compounds. Waste to Energy plants employ a combination of air pollution control devices, including scrubbers, fabric filters, and electrostatic precipitators to control acid gases, particles, nitrogen oxides, metals and organic emissions.

The EPA wants to make sure that harmful gases and particles are not going out the smokestack into the air. Scrubbers clean chemical gas emissions by spraying a liquid into the gas stream to neutralize the acids. Fabric filters and electrostatic precipitators remove particles from the emissions. The particles are then mixed with the ash that is removed from the bottom of the Waste to Energy plant's furnace when it is cleaned.

As stated previously, the most publicized concerns from environmentalists about the incineration of municipal solid wastes (MSW) involve the fear that it produces significant amounts of dioxin and furan emissions to the atmosphere. Dioxins and furans are considered by many to be serious health hazards. Older generation incinerators that were not equipped with modern gas cleaning technologies were indeed significant sources of dioxin emissions. Today, however, due to advances in emission control designs and stringent new governmental regulations, modern Waste to Energy incinerators emits virtually no dioxins. The quantity of pollutants in the emissions from large-scale incinerators is reduced by scrubbing process, as well as other processes.

According to the USEPA, modern incinerators are no longer significant sources of dioxins and furans. In 1987, before the governmental regulations required the use of emission controls, there was a total of 10,000 grams of dioxin emissions from U.S. Waste to Energy incinerators. Today, the total emissions from the 98 plants are only 10 grams, a reduction of 99.9%. Backyard barrel burning of household and garden wastes, still allowed in some rural areas, generates 580 grams of dioxins yearly. Studies conducted by the USEPA demonstrate that the emissions from just one family using a burn barrel produces more emissions than a modern incinerator disposing of 200 tons of waste per day.

According to the 2005 report from the Ministry of the Environment of Germany, where there are 66 incinerators, in 1990 one third of all dioxin emissions in Germany came from waste incineration plants, for the year 2000 the figure was less than 1%. Chimneys and tiled stoves in private households alone discharge approximately twenty times more dioxin into the environment than waste incineration plants.

Odour pollution can also be a problem with old-style incinerators, but odours and dust are extremely well controlled in a modern incinerator. They receive and store the waste in an enclosed area with a negative pressure with the airflow being routed through a boiler which prevents unpleasant odours from escaping into the atmosphere.

State-of-the-Art Waste to Energy Plant in the U.K

Sudbury could also incorporate clinical incinerators. The aim of incinerating this category of waste is to remove the pollution and health risks, rather than to reduce volume. Incineration of medical waste produces an end product ash that is sterile and non-hazardous.

We could also include a plant for human waste, solving our stinky problem in Lively. Toronto produces 160,000 tonnes a year in sewage. There is over 400,000 tonnes in Ontario. Toronto sends some 15 trucks a day to Quebec and elsewhere to dispose of it. That's another 15 full time truck driver jobs; not to mention more tipping fees.

Sewage is a source of biomass energy that is very similar to the other animal wastes, the only difference being that it has been treated in developed countries for many years. Energy can be extracted from sewage using anaerobic digestion to produce "biogas." The sewage sludge that remains can then be incinerated or undergo pyrolysis to produce more biogas and 'bio-oil'. The Plamsa Arc technology discussed earlier would do the job.

Sudbury spends over 8 million $ a year on fuel for our city buses, city vehicles, snowplows, fire trucks, ambulances, and cop cars. Biogas can be turned into diesel fuel which would save us over 8 million $. We would be getting paid to accept the fuel our vehicles burn. Our infeed fuel for free!

Paint sludge that used to be thrown away, for example, is now dried to a powder and shipped to a plastics manufacturer, ending up eventually as parking lot bumpers and guardrails, although, hopefully, we wouldn't be getting much paint in regular trash. However, the city collects used paint all the time, thus an "eco-elements" "eco-paint" factory could be established. To be recycled, the used paints are blended, filtered to industry standards and mixed with a percentage of conventional paint. The high-quality product covers most surfaces in one coat and is the half the price of comparable conventional paint. What was once a one-colour, limited-use product is now available in numerous grades, colours and percentages of post-consumer content.

"E-Waste" is a huge business today, and Xstrata's state-of-the-art Electronic Recycling Business operation, the only one of its kind in Canada, is located in an 82,200 square-foot industrial facility in Brampton, Ontario. Xstrata operates in Sudbury and there is no reason why we couldn't open a centre here; not only for Sudbury, but all of northern Ontario.

Electronic devices such as computer monitors and TVs contain hazardous materials that must be managed properly. Picture tubes, or cathode ray tubes (CRTs), are made with three to eight pounds of the heavy metal lead. Circuit boards also contain lead in addition to cadmium, mercury and other hazardous materials. Heavy metals such as lead can cause damage to living organisms at very low concentrations and tend to accumulate in the food chain.

Illegal dumping and the improper disposal of waste impacts public health and safety, property values and the quality of life in our community.

A Take it Back Network is a partnership among government agencies, retailers, repair shops, charitable organizations and recyclers that provides consumers with options for recycling certain wastes–and their hazardous components–in a safe and cost effective manner. Some electronics manufacturers also offered their corporate customers a recycling service for their used equipment.

Our Take it Back Network would accept a variety of electronic equipment such as computers, monitors, printers, TVs, cell phones, PDAs, fax machines, stereos, DVD and VCR players, other household electronics and rechargeable batteries. The electronics are recycled domestically in an environmentally sound manner.

Fluorescent light bulbs and tubes are no longer accepted as regular garbage and our new Electronic Recycling Business would accept fluorescent bulbs and tubes and recycle them domestically in an environmentally sound manner.

Continued after jump...

[ 09 July 2007: Message edited by: Sudbury ]