Converting garbage into energy is not a new concept, but with the growing unpopularity of landfills and emerging new technologies, it is attracting more and more attention.
The early incineration method used in the 1980s and earlier, which involved burning waste at high temperatures, became unpopular due to high operating costs and the gaseous pollution it produced.
In the past couple of decades, however, like all other technologies, waste-to-energy solutions have come a long way, and are becoming the preferred method to deal with the waste stream in many places around the world.
In Canada and the U.S., some municipalities have already started projects with modern garbage gasification technologies and many more are considering it as a feasible option. In gasification, unlike incineration, the amount of oxygen present during the process is limited.
"Over, the last decade or so, they [waste-to-energy technologies] have improved enormously; not only that, people have been prepared to spend more money on the technologies," says Prof. Lambert Otten, director of engineering at the University of Guelph and a waste management researcher.
"Modern plants that are up and running around the world do a pretty good job of it, the emission rates are extremely low…they really are not environmentally unsound," says Otten.
In Ottawa, a facility for plasma-arc gasification of waste, built and operated by the Ottawa-based Plasco Energy Group, is already in the testing stage, and is expected to be processing about 85 tonnes of waste per day once it becomes fully operational.
The city has signed a long-term contract with Plasco, agreeing to supply the waste and to pay $40 for each tonne processed.
"The waste that we will be processing is 85 tonnes a day in this plant which is just under 30,000 tonnes a year, so it's 10 per cent of what goes into the city's own landfill and it would probably [be] 1 per cent of what goes to all [the landfills]," says Rod Bryden, CEO of Plasco Energy Group.
Bryden says the company also has projects in other parts of the world, and may start working with two other municipalities in Canada, whose names he cannot disclose at this point.
Last year, the City of Edmonton announced plans to build an $87 million gasification facility, projected to start operating in 2010.
The plant is intended to increase the city's diversion rate—currently sitting at 60 per cent through its well-established reduction, composting, and recycling programs—to 90 percent.
"We're looking at ways of increasing our diversion rate, reducing our dependency on landfill even more, and gasification seems like one of the more feasible options," says Connie Boyce, director of community relations with Edmonton's Waste Management Branch.
"We did some feasibility studies…we looked at our waste stream and what types of material we are currently sending to the landfill, and that material is well-suited to gasification, it's a material that works well as a feedstock with this process."
Boyce, who says the city is currently diverting as much as it can from the residential waste stream, says they don't anticipate much opposition to the new project because it's an "environmentally sound decision".
"The environmental benefits by far outweigh any ifs and negative outputs," says Boyce.
But Rod Muir, a waste diversion campaigner for the Sierra Club, isn't convinced.
Founder of Waste Diversion Toronto, Muir says that although the technologies are being promoted as a way to solve the garbage problem, in reality the process is an inefficient and costly way to produce power.
It also diverts attention from reuse and recycling. Muir believes up to 90 per cent of waste can be recycled.
"By the end it's your definition of how hard you want to work at recycling, and I think in the end this becomes an excuse not to get more serious with people, not to be up front with them, and more motivating."
Prof. Otten agrees that anything that can be recycled, such as paper products, should not be in the energy-from-waste plan. "If you can recycle this stuff, economically or at least from an energy and sustainable environment point of view, you should do that first," he says.
"For the residue, the stuff that can't be recycled, for which there is no market, [waste-to-energy] is a perfectly good option. But you have to have a very large amount of waste before you have enough residue to make it economically possible."
Article updated Sept. 10, 2007. Mr. Rod Muir is the founder of Waste Diversion Toronto, not Waste Diversion Ontario, as this article originally stated. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
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