Waste Energy

Presence of surplus carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has taken center stage in the environmental science. All over the world people are worried about the excess amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because it’s causing undesirable changes in the surroundings such as green house effect, global warming, melting of ice caps on the glaciers etc. So most of the environmental scientists are trying to minimize the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. 18 Comments

We love to read about different travelers and their adventures, wishing secretly that we could be in their shoes. Here is a young traveler, Stacy Jurich, 2006 graduate of Ohio State University. She is on a 3 ½ month journey across the country, driving her 1981 Mercedes across America. So what is new? She is driving a Mercedes using waste vegetable oil as fuel hence promoting use of alternative fuel. She lives in Toledo, Ohio where she shoulders the responsibility of running a non-profit organization known as "Toledo Choose Local." This non-profit organization promotes self sustenance using local resources. 5 Comments

Consider a technology that not only keeps your surroundings clean it also produces renewable energy at a low cost. Wheelabrator Technologies Inc., a U.S. pioneer for municipal waste-to-energy technology, wants to make sure that your waste doesn’t go waste. Literally. Wheelabrator's waste-to-energy facilities produce steam and electricity by burning large quantities of municipal trash and they have been using this proven and time-tested mass-burn technology to produce energy for the past 100 years! 8 Comments

The enormous increase in the quantum and diversity of waste materials generated by human activity and their potentially harmful effects on the general environment and public health, have led to an increasing awareness about an urgent need to adopt scientific methods for safe disposal of wastes. While there is an obvious need to minimize the generation of wastes and to reuse and recycle them, the technologies for recovery of energy from wastes can play a vital role in mitigating the problems. Besides recovery of substantial energy, these technologies can lead to a substantial reduction in the overall waste quantities requiring final disposal, which can be better managed for safe disposal in a controlled manner while meeting the pollution control standards. 16 Comments

Despite being an attractive technological option for waste management, combustion-based processes for municipal solid waste (MSW) treatment are a subject of intense debate around the world. In the absence of effective controls, harmful pollutants may be emitted into the air, land and water which may influence human health and environment. Although incineration of municipal waste coupled with energy recovery can form an essential part of an integrated waste management system, yet strict controls are required to prevent its negative impacts on human health and environment. 7 Comments

The generation and disposal of organic waste without adequate treatment result in significant environmental pollution. Besides health concerns for the people in the vicinity of disposal sites, degradation of waste leads to uncontrolled release of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. Conventional means, like aeration, is energy intensive, expensive and also generates a significant quantity of biological sludge. In this context, anaerobic digestion offers potential energy savings and is a more stable process for medium and high strength organic effluents. Waste-to-Energy (WTE) plants, based on anaerobic digestion of biomass, are highly efficient in harnessing the untapped renewable energy potential of organic waste by converting the biodegradable fraction of the waste into high calorific gases. Apart from treating the wastewater, the methane produced from the biogas facilities can be recovered, with relative ease, for electricity generation and industrial/domestic heating. 9 Comments

We are already experiencing the ill effects of greenhouse gases in the form of global warming, glaciers and polar ice melting, rise in the sea level and sudden, unpredictable variation in weather, turning catastrophic sometimes. The eventual effect of global warming is sending a chill down the spines of environmentalists. Several teams of researchers are working overnight on carbon capture technology. It intends to remove undesirable amount of carbon dioxide, the main culprit in global warming, from the atmosphere. 7 Comments

For the past several months the San Francisco Public Utility Commission (SFPUC) has begun picking up used cooking oil from restaurants and businesses for free in an effort to find fuel alternatives for its municipal fleet. The city hopes to expand the grease recycling program (called SFGreasecycle) to include small-scale household pickups and eventually power all city vehicles on biodiesel, including public buses and fire trucks. The oil is picked from local restaurants by SFPUC trucks, dropped off at a transfer station, filtered, transferred into a multi storage tank settling system, then decanted for three days. The oil is then sold to a biodiesel plant using bulk transport tractor-trailer pickups. 4 Comments

The National Research Council of Canada's Biotechnology Research Institute has begun research and development of a process that will extract hydrogen from organic waste materials like fermentable feedstock and manure. The materials are processed to hydrogen by dark and photofermentation. The goal is to "come up with biosystems that could be grouped into a multiple-stage process to capture almost all the hydrogen from the primary feedstock". One dairy farm in Ontario is already producing power from manure using an anaerobic digester. 2 Comments

The government of California is backing an initiative between the Linde Group and Waste Management to build a liquefied natural gas facility that will produce clean liquid fuel from landfill gas using minicipal waste incinerators. The facility is expected to open in 2009 and will produce up to 13,000 gallons of fuel per day. The ground-breaking project will be the largest of its kind and will enable California to tap into a valuable renewable source of clean energy while greatly reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. 5 Comments

Swiss Company Pyromex has been developing waste management technologies for almost twenty years. Their goal is to lower emissions and reduce landfill waste with their patented ultra-high temperature gasification system. In 1999 the first industrial plant was built in Germany. According to the company, the Pyromex gasification system can treat all types of waste, with the single exception of heavily contaminated nuclear residues! The Pyromex technology just may be the ultimate waste energy solution - to treat all types of waste without waste residues and without harmful emissions to the atmosphere - while recovering all valuable constituent of the waste at highly economic conditions. 22 Comments

Growing urbanisation and changes in the pattern of life, give rise to generation of increasing quantities of wastes and it's now becoming another threat to our already degraded environment. However, in recent years, waste-to-energy technologies have been developed to produce clean energy through the combustion of municipal solid waste in specially designed power plants equipped with the most modern pollution control equipment to clean emissions. Yet, solid waste management practices differ for developed and developing nations. In developing countries like Pakistan, institutions charged with the responsibility to make decisions on solid waste management, operate in the enormous information, policy and strategy vacuum and lack therefore the ability to address this looming environmental disaster. 48 Comments

Researchers at the Center for Biotechnology at The Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University are developing an amazing new technology which will potentially have the ability to extract electricity from pollution and organic waste products. They hope their biological fuel cells will help slow global warming by cleaning excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. At the same time this new technology would help deal with rising populations and resultant waste/pollution problems. This process would also eliminate the need to use fossil fuels as an energy source. Currently, fuel cell energy requires heat and a fuel source in order to produce energy. 2 Comments

The environmental impact of waste-to-energy technology outweighs the benefits when it comes to a proposed garbage incinerator in Greater Vancouver, according to a leading pollution researcher. The new trash incinerator would be 80 per cent larger than the existing garbage burning facility in Burnaby. The proposal by Montenay Inc. is just one of 23 now being considered by the GVRD as weighs what to do with the 500,000 tonnes of waste that now goes to its soon-to-close Cache Creek regional landfill. Dr. Michael Easton argues building a second, much bigger version of the Burnaby incinerator that Montenay already runs is a bad idea. 3 Comments

APS Energy Services has begun construction on a large-scale renewable energy facility as part of the Northern Nevada Correctional Center's plan to generate heat and electricity using forest waste products. A 30-kW solar photovoltaic system will be combined with a wood-fired biomass boiler. Wood chips from surrounding forest-thinning industries will be processed in a heat and power plant, which will generate electricity, steam and hot water for the facilities. The power plant will produce 8 million kW of electricity per year, allowing excess energy to be sold to Sierra Pacific Power Co. No Comments