Waste to Energy

choi

Edward Humes, Grappling With a Garbage Glut; We toss out 7 pounds of trash a day each, spending billions to manage it .
Wall Street Journal, Apr 14, 2012.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 37702024537204.html

(1) Excerpt in the window of print: One engineering technology--the garbage death ray--vaporizes trash with arcs of electrical energy.

(2) Quote:

"the average American tosses out 4.4 pounds of trash a day, with about a third getting recycled and the rest going to landfills. These numbers are found in the Environmental Protection Agency's exhaustive annual compendium "Municipal Solid Waste in the United States"—America's trash Bible * * * [but] the most recent survey conducted by Columbia University and the trade journal BioCycle found that Americans actually throw out much more than the EPA estimates, a whopping 7.1 pounds a day, and that less than a quarter of it gets recycled.

"Trash has become America's leading export: mountains of waste paper, soiled cardboard, crushed beer cans and junked electronics. China's No. 1 export to the U.S. is computers, according the Journal of Commerce. The United States' No. 1 export to China, by number of cargo containers, is scrap.

"Los Angeles has opted to construct a garbage mountain 500 feet high, taller than most of the city's high-rises. This is Puente Hills Landfill—trash as geologic feature, so full of 60 years' worth of decomposing garbage that the methane it produces is pumped into generators that provide enough power for 70,000 homes. * * * Puente Hills is just the largest of the 1,900 municipal landfills operating nationwide.

"the average Japanese generates 2.5 pounds [of trash per day]

"Other countries also are shunning landfills. Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium and Denmark all send less than 4% of their garbage to landfills; Germany does no landfilling at all. Recycling rates there are two to three times America's, and the rest of their trash goes to waste-to-energy plants.

"The preferred mode in Europe is to build not a few hugely expensive incineration behemoths but a larger number of smaller, community-based utilities that burn trash to provide electricity and heat through underground conduits. The technology in the newest plants limits toxic emissions of dioxins, a major issue with incinerators of the past, to levels similar to a backyard barbecue's

(3) Note: Waste-to-energy in Taiwan.
(a) Energy recovery--taiwan. waste-to-energy research and technology Council (WTERT), Earth Engineering Center, Columbia University, undated.
http://www.seas.columbia.edu/earth/wtert/globalwte_TW.html
(b) Onyx Ta-Ho
http://www.tahoho.com.tw/
, a joint venture between Taiwan Cement Corporation and Onyx (VEOLIA Environnement Group), manages under contracts (either 15- or 20-year0 many of municipal incineration facilities in Taiwan. the following link is in Chinese (one can change language by selecting "English in the upper right corner of the web page).
http://www.tahoho.com.tw/contents/about02.asp

(i) vivendi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivendi
(a French multinational mass media and telecommunication company headquartered in Paris; section 1 History: In July 2000, Vivendi spun off its water and waste companies—once its core business—along with interests in other public service sectors such as transport into Vivendi Environnement (IPO in Paris in July 2000 and in New York in October 2001), later (2003) renamed Veolia Environnement)
(ii) modus vivendi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_vivendi
("vivendi means 'of living'" in Latin)