A few years back, I was interviewed for an article on CopenHill inThrillist (https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/copenhill-copenhagen-ski-slope-power-plant). While lauding the fact that it made for unusually interesting municipal design, I also said "One can debate the merits of waste-to-energy. Yes, it makes energy from garbage, but it’s still incinerating it and spewing not-so-great things into the air, even when it’s called clean waste-to-energy. And wouldn’t it be better to not make so much garbage in the first place?”
I've since taken to calling waste-to-energy "waste incineration with a side of energy."
There is no solution to managing solid waste other than not producing it in the first place. I'm on our little town in Maine's solid waste committee. One fact that surprised me is that close to half of municipal solid waste (MSW) in Maine is demolition and construction waste. Using existing buildings instead of building new can help.
Just composting food waste would also help reduce the quantity of MSW and also save money, since dumping it in landfill or incinerating is priced by the ton and food waste is heavy.
Well the question then becomes what to do with the rubbish/garbage.
Saying "lets not make it" is the same as Beauty queens asking for world peace, it does not work in reality.
Despite talk of "circular economy " and "fixing recycling" nothing meaningful actually happens other than a lot of hand wringing.
Yet total volume of waste is increasing year on year - it's not reducing, more and more goes to land fills with all the resulting problems.
Some progress has been made with improving recycling of organic material but in the grand scheme of things they boarder on vanity projects.
Waste to energy is still a proven viable option to reduce the volume of waste and reduce fossil fuel consumption despite the disadvantages talked about in the article
Thanks Lloyd. Just by coincidence, I ran into a short youtube last night about this facility, although I had read about it years ago. Not to be a contrarian, but maybe we should cut Bjarke and the Danes some slack. As I have to keep reminding myself, perfect is the enemy of good. We can wish for perfect recycling and zero waste, but it may never happen in reality. In the meanwhile, do we prefer existing garbage to uncontrollably pollute the ground and air (especially since organic waste will degrade to potent methane), or do we control it as much as possible and even get some useful heat and electricity out of it, with CO2 instead of atmospheric methane? Not perfect, but better than nothing. Or even worse, armchair environmentalism. Everything has upsides and downsides. I love heat pumps as much as anyone (installed one at home), but of course they still use electricity, some of which comes from fossil fuels even in Ontario, and then you have all the issues with refrigerants, of all kinds (possibly except ammonia and CO2, which are mostly industrial).
Lloyd, thank you for this. do you have any update on Dioxins. It used to be a huge problem with incineration. The smoke ash from the inside of the chimney was used as compost on public parks but that had to be stopped when the level of dioxins in it were examined. I'd be interested if you have anything on this.
Bob, thank you for this. I do feel the way you way it that it’s all together and organised. But what seems to happen is that we are always finding in later phases the lack of joined up thinking in the earlier phases. But isn’t where we are in this moment just an ‘earlier’ stage when viewed from a future vantage point and because we are not using interconnected thinking (or any larger cohesive vision for what we want our future to be) will we not just find ‘errors’ in what we think we are doing well at the moment?
1) The waste streams exist - shouting "circular economy" does not change this.
We are not going to get that circular economy probably within the life times of people reading this. The last time we did was in the 1920's. So it needs to be managed.
2) Burning waste in properly designed, and managed waste to heat/power plants reduces the consumption of fossil fuels.
3) Carbon emissions from WasteToHeat systems do tend to be higher than other options such as gas but they are short cycle carbon emissions while gas/coal emissions are long cycle. And hence can basically be ignored.
Anybody who objects to no 3 needs to spend some time reading about the different carbon cycles.
Bob, thank you elaborating. Yes I can see where you are on the tech side, it makes sense. If though we want to solve it, are we not too far downsteam of the source and root which is overconsumption based on our current psychology? We’re trying to manage this with tech but we’re not limiting the flow from its root cause.
True however there is not a viable solution being presented to solving that. Just a rather large amount of wishful thinking and hand wringing and wailing.
We are indeed solving it at the end rather than the beginning but there is no pathway to dealing with that. People have been complaining about consumerism and over consumption my whole life, and I am old , without any progress about addressing the issue.
So we need intermediate solutions, even if they are not very pleasant, while we wait for somebody to come up with an actual way of dealing with this.
Bob, thank you for replying and your common sense words. I do feel we need to approach it in parallel strands. There was no data when I was speaking about this in the early 90’s, now we are awash with it. I have written about the psychological root causes on my substack, the research is quite clear where we are. As you say not much is being done on this front. I find it strange considering we understand the root causes, why not deal directly with them. And the benefits for us and the Earth are huge.
The good news is that Denmark does not include waste-to-energy as 'renewable energy' and as the country works towards its 2030 renewable energy targets Denmark is leading Europe in terms of replacing waste cogeneration plants with giant heat pumps. The amount of incinerators in Denmark stems from their reliance on district heating and now that giant heat pumps have matured and the country has lots of wind they are extremely well positioned to decarbonise their building stock very, very quickly (and without having any impact on users so the whole process is much easier and faster). Waste to energy is absolutely the worst way of generating energy, but aside from Copenhagen they are going to be very easy to replace.
One thing about those landfills; at some point in the indefinite future, we'll be reprocessing that waste for the essentially immortal plastic hydrocarbons that have been entombed there for all eternity. Hopefully, we'll have figured out how to convert them into useful products that do not inflate the CO2 end of the carbon cycle by then.
Thanks for this update on the ARC project in Copenhagen. I think everybody should have been suspicious when the words skiing and incineration were used in the same sentence. The Copenhill project was troubled from the start. Two years ago, I looked at an investigation of the politics and big money that ruined the effort.
Pro tip on any kind of burning that claims to be a climate solution: if it looks like garbage, smells like garbage, and seeps into your hair and clothes like garbage … it’s garbage. This was always too good to be true—delusional, in fact. I’m really glad, as Adrian mentioned, that Denmark is accounting for these emissions and attempting to eliminate them.
Getting to zero waste and zero emissions at this point may require a compete collapse of so-called civilization. I’m not sure humans are smart enough to get there before all our toys are taken away.
"... may require a compete collapse of so-called civilization...."
I'm assuming "complete" is the actual word.
Trust me, worrying about CO2 (or any other emissions) will be the least of all the problems that will then rise to the fore if your desired "collapse" comes about. It will lead, once again, to that Hobbesian phrase "short, nasty, and brutish" becoming the new Standard of Living of almost everyone. Anyone that survives will be wishing for these current "good old days" and going "what were they THINKING?????".
Unless, of course, you are either the Strong Man (e.g. warlord) or his acolytes (yes, the Patriarchy will assume its position in a hurry and with great Evil. And they will laugh about it. Feminists will be on the menu for dinner (perhaps more than rhetorically speaking). The weak, ill, and aged will be cast aside with no after thoughts.
And many people will become their "toys" for the short amount of time they have life left.
First world citizens have no idea how good we really have it. Go to Haiti and live in one of their cities' ghettos for a couple of years to see what I mean. That is, if you last that long. Ditto many other nations around the world.
You have NO IDEA what you revealed in that short phrase.
A few years back, I was interviewed for an article on CopenHill inThrillist (https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/copenhill-copenhagen-ski-slope-power-plant). While lauding the fact that it made for unusually interesting municipal design, I also said "One can debate the merits of waste-to-energy. Yes, it makes energy from garbage, but it’s still incinerating it and spewing not-so-great things into the air, even when it’s called clean waste-to-energy. And wouldn’t it be better to not make so much garbage in the first place?”
I've since taken to calling waste-to-energy "waste incineration with a side of energy."
There is no solution to managing solid waste other than not producing it in the first place. I'm on our little town in Maine's solid waste committee. One fact that surprised me is that close to half of municipal solid waste (MSW) in Maine is demolition and construction waste. Using existing buildings instead of building new can help.
Just composting food waste would also help reduce the quantity of MSW and also save money, since dumping it in landfill or incinerating is priced by the ton and food waste is heavy.
Well the question then becomes what to do with the rubbish/garbage.
Saying "lets not make it" is the same as Beauty queens asking for world peace, it does not work in reality.
Despite talk of "circular economy " and "fixing recycling" nothing meaningful actually happens other than a lot of hand wringing.
Yet total volume of waste is increasing year on year - it's not reducing, more and more goes to land fills with all the resulting problems.
Some progress has been made with improving recycling of organic material but in the grand scheme of things they boarder on vanity projects.
Waste to energy is still a proven viable option to reduce the volume of waste and reduce fossil fuel consumption despite the disadvantages talked about in the article
Thanks Lloyd. Just by coincidence, I ran into a short youtube last night about this facility, although I had read about it years ago. Not to be a contrarian, but maybe we should cut Bjarke and the Danes some slack. As I have to keep reminding myself, perfect is the enemy of good. We can wish for perfect recycling and zero waste, but it may never happen in reality. In the meanwhile, do we prefer existing garbage to uncontrollably pollute the ground and air (especially since organic waste will degrade to potent methane), or do we control it as much as possible and even get some useful heat and electricity out of it, with CO2 instead of atmospheric methane? Not perfect, but better than nothing. Or even worse, armchair environmentalism. Everything has upsides and downsides. I love heat pumps as much as anyone (installed one at home), but of course they still use electricity, some of which comes from fossil fuels even in Ontario, and then you have all the issues with refrigerants, of all kinds (possibly except ammonia and CO2, which are mostly industrial).
Lloyd, thank you for this. do you have any update on Dioxins. It used to be a huge problem with incineration. The smoke ash from the inside of the chimney was used as compost on public parks but that had to be stopped when the level of dioxins in it were examined. I'd be interested if you have anything on this.
Dioxins are a class of chemicls that are inflammable, modern incinnerators have zones
where the gasses are held at different concentrations of O2 and temps to burn them up.
Hence they dont seem to be an issue anymore. Ofcourse simpler incenerators are not approved for burning dioxin containing waste.
Bob, thank you for this. I do feel the way you way it that it’s all together and organised. But what seems to happen is that we are always finding in later phases the lack of joined up thinking in the earlier phases. But isn’t where we are in this moment just an ‘earlier’ stage when viewed from a future vantage point and because we are not using interconnected thinking (or any larger cohesive vision for what we want our future to be) will we not just find ‘errors’ in what we think we are doing well at the moment?
I am not sure about your first sentence.
However consider this:
1) The waste streams exist - shouting "circular economy" does not change this.
We are not going to get that circular economy probably within the life times of people reading this. The last time we did was in the 1920's. So it needs to be managed.
2) Burning waste in properly designed, and managed waste to heat/power plants reduces the consumption of fossil fuels.
3) Carbon emissions from WasteToHeat systems do tend to be higher than other options such as gas but they are short cycle carbon emissions while gas/coal emissions are long cycle. And hence can basically be ignored.
Anybody who objects to no 3 needs to spend some time reading about the different carbon cycles.
Bob, thank you elaborating. Yes I can see where you are on the tech side, it makes sense. If though we want to solve it, are we not too far downsteam of the source and root which is overconsumption based on our current psychology? We’re trying to manage this with tech but we’re not limiting the flow from its root cause.
True however there is not a viable solution being presented to solving that. Just a rather large amount of wishful thinking and hand wringing and wailing.
We are indeed solving it at the end rather than the beginning but there is no pathway to dealing with that. People have been complaining about consumerism and over consumption my whole life, and I am old , without any progress about addressing the issue.
So we need intermediate solutions, even if they are not very pleasant, while we wait for somebody to come up with an actual way of dealing with this.
Bob, thank you for replying and your common sense words. I do feel we need to approach it in parallel strands. There was no data when I was speaking about this in the early 90’s, now we are awash with it. I have written about the psychological root causes on my substack, the research is quite clear where we are. As you say not much is being done on this front. I find it strange considering we understand the root causes, why not deal directly with them. And the benefits for us and the Earth are huge.
The good news is that Denmark does not include waste-to-energy as 'renewable energy' and as the country works towards its 2030 renewable energy targets Denmark is leading Europe in terms of replacing waste cogeneration plants with giant heat pumps. The amount of incinerators in Denmark stems from their reliance on district heating and now that giant heat pumps have matured and the country has lots of wind they are extremely well positioned to decarbonise their building stock very, very quickly (and without having any impact on users so the whole process is much easier and faster). Waste to energy is absolutely the worst way of generating energy, but aside from Copenhagen they are going to be very easy to replace.
So where is their burnable waste going - probably to somebodys elses incenerator.
One thing about those landfills; at some point in the indefinite future, we'll be reprocessing that waste for the essentially immortal plastic hydrocarbons that have been entombed there for all eternity. Hopefully, we'll have figured out how to convert them into useful products that do not inflate the CO2 end of the carbon cycle by then.
Thanks for this update on the ARC project in Copenhagen. I think everybody should have been suspicious when the words skiing and incineration were used in the same sentence. The Copenhill project was troubled from the start. Two years ago, I looked at an investigation of the politics and big money that ruined the effort.
https://greendispatch.substack.com/p/how-corporate-power-nixed-copenhagens?utm_source=publication-search
thats amazing! I am adding your link to the bottom of the post.
Miami is currently fighting over a trash incinerator plan. https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/miramar-continues-trash-incinerator-fight-after-miami-dade-mayor-backtracks/3527672/
Pro tip on any kind of burning that claims to be a climate solution: if it looks like garbage, smells like garbage, and seeps into your hair and clothes like garbage … it’s garbage. This was always too good to be true—delusional, in fact. I’m really glad, as Adrian mentioned, that Denmark is accounting for these emissions and attempting to eliminate them.
Getting to zero waste and zero emissions at this point may require a compete collapse of so-called civilization. I’m not sure humans are smart enough to get there before all our toys are taken away.
"... may require a compete collapse of so-called civilization...."
I'm assuming "complete" is the actual word.
Trust me, worrying about CO2 (or any other emissions) will be the least of all the problems that will then rise to the fore if your desired "collapse" comes about. It will lead, once again, to that Hobbesian phrase "short, nasty, and brutish" becoming the new Standard of Living of almost everyone. Anyone that survives will be wishing for these current "good old days" and going "what were they THINKING?????".
Unless, of course, you are either the Strong Man (e.g. warlord) or his acolytes (yes, the Patriarchy will assume its position in a hurry and with great Evil. And they will laugh about it. Feminists will be on the menu for dinner (perhaps more than rhetorically speaking). The weak, ill, and aged will be cast aside with no after thoughts.
And many people will become their "toys" for the short amount of time they have life left.
First world citizens have no idea how good we really have it. Go to Haiti and live in one of their cities' ghettos for a couple of years to see what I mean. That is, if you last that long. Ditto many other nations around the world.
You have NO IDEA what you revealed in that short phrase.