Energy Creation from Waste

Currently, a huge amount of land is used worldwide for waste landfills. Due to their negative environmental impacts and a decrease in available land, especially in European countries, many alternatives to landfills are being sought for safe waste disposal. One alternative is producing energy from waste. Although some form of energy-from-waste disposal methods have been used for many years, recent advances in technology have made this method much safer with fewer negative environmental impacts. As a result, many new processing plants have been established worldwide for producing many types of energy sources from waste materials.

British, and in business? Search here for employee liability insurance, home business insurance, public liability cover

Energy-from-waste (or also known as waste-to-energy) is an energy recovery process where various forms of usable power, such as electricity or heat fuels, are created from a waste source. These sources can include a wide range of materials including municipal solid waste, agricultural wastes like livestock manure and crop silage, construction debris, industrial waste from mills and the gases that are naturally produced in landfills. Overall, an energy-from-waste process has many advantages over other types of waste disposal systems. These advantages can include a safe and effective solution for managing local trash generation, cleaner power sources, less dependence upon imported fuels and a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

The major process used for producing energy from waste is incineration. This process, which was used as far back as 1898 when New York City began generating energy from garbage, generally involves burning municipal solid waste to heat water for powering steam generators that create electrical energy. In the past, there were many environmental concerns regarding the operation of incinerators. These included the amounts of toxic fly ash and bottom ash created in the process, as well as the high levels of fine particulates, heavy metals and other acidic elements emitted into the atmosphere from smokestacks. However, over the past decade most of these concerns have been eliminated through the use of lime scrubbers and other technologies that neutralize negative elements before they reach the atmosphere. All modern incinerators must now operate under very strict environmental regulations. Over time they have also become much more efficient to the point where most incineration plants can reduce the volume of original waste by as much as 95% while achieving higher energy outputs.

Recent advancements is technologies have also provided other thermal methods for generating energy from waste. These include the processes of pyrolysis and thermal gasification. Pyrolysis uses heat to break down organic matter in the absence of oxygen to produce combustible gases like methane, hydrocarbons and flammable liquids. In contrast, thermal gasification burns waste in the presence of limited amounts of oxygen to also produce similar types of flammable materials. As opposed to incinerators that convert waste to energy for use only on-site, both pyrolysis and thermal gasification produce fuels that can be transported.

Additionally, there are emerging biological waste-to-energy technologies that use microbes and other natural organisms to produce combustible fuels from waste. These technologies include bio-gas plants, which utilizes anaerobic digestion in a controlled environment to convert food or other agricultural wastes into flammable gases, and fermentation processing plants that use yeast to produce ethanol from waste materials. Because landfills are still the primary alternative for waste disposal, increased efforts are underway to capture and use more of the methane that must vented as the result of the anaerobic digestion of organic materials that naturally occurs when waste materials are buried.

 

Copyright Fell Environmental 2010