Combined, it’s a pretty foul mixture of materials and chemicals – a mixture that I certainly wouldn’t want to touch, let alone burn for energy. What do you typically throw away? If I had to guess, I’d say you toss out a wide array of items – food scraps, old cleaning products, non-recyclable plastic packaging, expired medicine, old clothes, and so much more. But unlike wood or coal, our trash is anything but uniform. are starting to consider using them to “get rid of” our trash. But as the production of cheap goods continues to snowball and concerns around the climate crisis grow, waste management companies across the U.S. These technologies were originally designed to treat fuel sources like wood or coal. This process creates a synthetic fuel that is then burned in an oxygen-rich environment to produce energy – or “dirty” energy in this case. The idea behind high-heat gasification and pyrolysis technologies is to expose trash to high temperatures with little to no oxygen. Energy Generated from Trash is Just Dirty Energy Simply put, burning trash to create energy will not solve our growing waste problem or the climate crisis. And, they inhibit efforts to reduce our overall waste, which would be much more effective in cutting climate-damaging emissions. Not only do they endanger our health and the environment, but they also generate little energy as compared to cleaner sources. “New” incineration technologies – high-heat treatments like gasification and pyrolysis – are actually a really dirty business. What’s more, industry hacks claim that their so-called “waste-to-energy” technologies can help combat the climate crisis by reducing climate-damaging emissions like methane and carbon dioxide.īut these claims are misleading and inaccurate, and allow for waste incinerators to devour renewable energy subsidies that should be reserved for real sources of sustainable energy. But in recent years, it has been falsely rebranded as a sustainable source of “clean” energy. Incineration was originally thought of as another way to “get rid of” trash (it doesn’t, really). has consistently used since the 1880s – incineration. But there’s another form of disposal that the U.S. landfilled about 139 million tons of trash in 2017 alone. Photo: Shutterstockįor centuries we’ve relied on landfilling as our main source of waste disposal. This 'closes the carbon cycle', because you aren't digging up ancient carbon and adding it to the atmosphere, you are taking crop carbon that only came out of the atmosphere this year.Burning trash to create energy will not solve our growing waste problem or the climate crisis. Some bags are made out of organic oils, which works too. Most plastics are made from petroleum (The Shah of Iran, very impressed with plastics manufacture, was astonished that we burned such a useful feedstock). Or have plastic bags just for the wet trash, and paper for all the dry. So if you have proper hygiene about your trash (throwing away basically dry stuff, using the sink drain for the wet), that removes the issue with paper bags. So to stay within EPA limits, the incinerator must crank up the burners, expending even more fossil fuel. So this is also cooling down the incinerator, and a cold-running incinerator runs dirty with incomplete combustion and throws a lot of HCs and particulates into the air. it tends to absorb huge amounts of thermal energy while cooling things to 100C (212F) or below. (the units in parentheses are the imperial version of that data I am not saying 1kg=1lb nor 349kj=150 BTU). Water does not burn, and every kilogram (pound) of water requires 349,000 joules (150 BTU) to warm it to boiling, and 2,260,000 joules (970 BTU) to boil it away, so that means they have to use a stupid amount of fossil fuel simply to boil away the water. Most trash will burn exothermically, meaning the incinerator only has to use fossil fuels to start the trash stream burning once lit, the incinerator is sustained by the burning of the trash itself. Water based liquids are particularly bad news when incinerating. Water based liquids are very heavy and add a lot of mass to the waste stream. Liquids should go down the sink, (unless they are non-water non-biological). Firstoff, you really need to not throw out liquids.

Burning trash without creating pollutin