What Happened?
Glendale, Arizona, is considering implementing a garbage-to-energy plant to transform residential and commercial waste into heat and light for buildings across the city. The $110 million factory could take up to 20 months to be built, creating 50 jobs and generating 15 MW of electricity from 180,000 tons of garbage per year.
So What?
The garbage-to-energy plant will be able to produce electricity from a variety of waste including organic and plastics which will greatly increase how much refuse is repurposed. The latest technologies have allowed such trash power facilities to meet emissions standards and prevent the release of dangerous pollutants during the gasification process. The factories utilize sensors to automatically sort through garbage piles and select the usable pieces with high rates of accuracy.
How It Works
The trash-to-energy facilities perform pyrolytic gasification to convert standard garbage and debris into synthetic gas. This end result creates steam that supplies turbines with power and produces enough energy to support thousands of single family homes each year. While the gasification process produces an ash that can be recycled or discarded, there is no burning or odor released during the conversion.
Beneficial Outcomes
The plant will heat the waste under well-regulated conditions, as opposed to incineration which has little monitoring involved. The technology limits the conversion so there is no combustion which could increase pollutants being released. This technique for transforming garbage into energy rich fuels is optimal over traditional combustion because it:
- Offers increased possibility for recycling by recovering products from waste more readily
- Obtains higher conversion efficiency than fossil-fuel energy generation while reducing greenhouse emissions
- Scales easily to meet the needs of the community
- Processes a wider variety of waste including agricultural residues, household and commercial waste, residues from recycling, electrical waste, plastic and packaging debris
Oslo Runs Low On Garbage
Oslo, Sweden, has gained a reputation for its leading garbage-to-energy conversion capabilities. The city has developed such eco-friendly practices within the city limits, as well as strong conversion performance, that Oslo has run out of garbage to process through the gasification systems. The city now imports trash and debris from other countries such as England and Ireland to sustain its renewable energy initiative.
Since implementing trash-to-energy technology, Oslo is able to power half of the city and all of its schools with processed garbage. While Oslo’s industry-leading strides in renewable energy sourcing has paved the way for other regions to follow suit, the countries in Northern Europe are already relatively eco-friendly in their daily operations and only produce 150 million tons of waste annually. The garbage-to-energy plants in Oslo can process more than 700 million tons of waste a year, creating a lack of supply that most countries do not enjoy.
As a result, a European garbage market has arisen, as Oslo seeks out sources of trash from neighboring countries and has the waste shipped over to support city infrastructure. Other European countries less advanced in the garbage-to-energy movement are happy to send their trash to Oslo, as England, for example, sends more than 1,000 tons a month to its neighbor to avoid overwhelming landfills.
Trash Changes
Gov1 has monitored other developments in the collection and trash and development of new fuel sources to save cities money.[/dw-post-more]