Waste disposal in the real world

Wednesday 17th December 2008, 2:59PM GMT.

From Nick Palmer.
OPEN University Professor Adrian Demaid (JEP, 12 December) tells us of the 70s and 80s, when he, and his students of engineering systems, looked at the energy balances of waste disposal systems and came to the conclusion that incineration with power generation ‘beat all other strategies hands down’. He asserts that ‘energy accounting is still the best accounting method to deal with complex systems such as waste disposal strategies’ – well, he would, wouldn’t he.

He reminds me of the apocryphal physics professor who claimed that he could accurately forecast the result of any horse race using highly advanced mathematical modelling techniques. Unfortunately, the technique was rather useless and misleading because modelling the whole of race horse reality was too complex and, in order to work his calculations, he needed to assume that all horses were spherical and moving in a vacuum.

It is a similar story with Professor Demaid’s energy-accounting methods, which are useful for ascertaining the most efficient strategies within the context of a non-sustainable society, such as the one we live in. If he thinks they can be used to define the ‘chess moves’ that we need to transition to a sustainable society then he is very much mistaken, as the parameters and methods, and the underlying assumptions, of this method of accounting are far too narrow and simplistic to show us a viable direction.

Professor Demaid’s talents may be able to metaphorically count definitively how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but this misplaced academic excellence is akin to the sort of red-herring sophistry that fooled too many of the previous House when they voted to commission another incinerator, which clearly demonstrated that too many of our politicians have no idea of the situation that we are heading for, nor appreciate the strategies that will be needed to extricate ourselves from it.
Winterwood,
Rue des Hamonnets,
St Lawrence.

1
Harry

December 18, 2008 at 4:36 pm

So now that Mr Palmer has tried to belittle the Professor’s scientific apraisal of incineration disposal of rubbish, perhaps he would like to come up with some scientific and economic evaluation of his alternatives.
Lets start with the cost say recycling plastic bottles, as the constable of St Helier has quoted he could make thousands of pounds by recycling them.
Lets start with the simplest collecion, a skip.
So the cost of driving to the skip is borne by the disposer, and lets forget the CO2 emmitted by his Chelsea tractor! say £30 for the skip company to supply and empty the skip per load.

Unfortunately bottles dont weigh too much so a full skip will hold say 100-150kg of plastic

So each tonne of plastic bottles will cost £200-£300 to get to the recycler on the island.

The recycler obviously has to have a yard staff and baler to compress and bale the plastic, say costing £30/tonne. Then he has to ship the plastic say £50/tonne

Finally when he gets to the recycler who is feeling the credit crunch like everybody else, and the bottom has dropped out of the market will give you say £30/tonne

So looking at the costs of this green recycling!
250+30+50 – 30 = £300 per tonne

and this is for a high quality product which at least is worth recycling! Unfortunately the recycler will only accept the decent stuff so that any low grade or contaminated recyclables are not accepted, so have to be stored, presumably until we find some 3rd world economy desperate enough to be paid to litter their country with. Not an acceptable solution!

So the alternative is to incinerate the rubbish and extract its energy and turn into either heat or electricity. So how many of you have Gas or oil fired heating? Where you burn a fuel to keep your houses warm. The only difference with an incinerator is that the fuel is free! Of course those on electric heating will say they are usng clean nuclear energy, well sorry to say some of the JEC’s electricity is generated by burning dirty heavy fuel oil, just look at the black / brown plume that can sometimes be seen from their chimney.

However there is a place for recycling, lets concentrate on things that dont burn eg glass and metal, and those things which are highly toxic eg electronic circuit boards.

Perhaps our contribution to reduce global warming should be to utilise the vast tidal energy present around our shores, or even a wind farm, this can then carbon offset the incinerator.

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2
Felix Staratschek

December 31, 2008 at 9:14 am

Incineration change a lot of harmless substances into harmful substances. The left overs of incineration are very poisonic und they need very safe landfills. They produce high complex mirco- and nano- particles.

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