I find it very difficult to seperate my trash. I should have at least
If I just delivered everything to my company and they’d give my some money for the energy. Maybe I didn’t have to pay for the next electricity/heating bill…
I know that some of my waste would be hazardous if burnt at too low temps. But if the power plant burned everything at 600 celcius or over?
Including metal and glass? Right.
Than what do they do with all the slag? What do you do about all the people who die from the tons of rather deadly pollution you just kicked into the atmosphere? What about the fact that it likely takes more energy to incinerate your garbage than the garbage produces. And you want us to pay you?
Just learn to sort your garbage.
Ok, you’ll get metal as by-products - a problem?
A problem. Yes.
The bigger manufacturing of things become, the more economical it usually gets (maybe not valid in nanotech). But burn everything and you get basic elements. We know how to attract all of them(chemically or not).
What you need is one of these.
One problem is that it’s not very useful to have all the different materials all melted together. If the recyclables are sorted, the bottle glass can be melted down to make new bottle glass, the tin cans to make new tin cans and so forth. But if you just incinerate all of it, you end up with a pile of mixed materials not good for anything.
Lots of places have given up on making you sort your recycling, and just want everything–plastic, paper, cardboard, steel, aluminum, and glass–mixed up all together in a bucket. Then you’ve got your compostable waste. Don’t know if you’ve got that in your locality. We don’t, but we just take everything and dump it in one of two big compost bins. When one is full, empty the old one and start using that.
The big advantage of that is it keeps food scraps out of the trash so the raccoons don’t knock them over so often.
Then you’ve got electronic waste. Lucky for me I can take that shit to work and dump it in the PC recycle bin. Otherwise, keep it in a bin for the once a year dropoff.
Then what’s left? Unrecyclable plastic, random stuff…not much else.
The only really burnable part out of all this is the paper and plastic and cardboard. And we really don’t want to burn the plastic for environmental reasons. And the paper is still pretty bad. What’s wrong with dumping that shit in the recycle bin?
Even if they were incinerating waste they still wouldn’t let you dump glass and metal and toxic materials into the waste bound for incineration, so you’d still have almost as much work to do.
My home wine becomes methanol, ethanol, water based on temperature/pressure and so does everything chemically, heavy metals are heavy or attracted to magnetic field. Please, try to follow my OP or give better ways for garbage collecting.
Here’s the plan.
Bury your trash for now. We’re not going to ever run out of landfill space, it’s a physical impossibility. (where do you think most of the actual matter to make the trash came from? Holes in the ground…)
In the future, like real soon now (we’re talking 10-20 years max) we should have far, far cheaper robots with machine vision and manipulation capabilities. At that point, we could just dig some of these landfills back up, and have the robots sort the trash. They will not be harmed or bothered by the smell, and they can sort it all.
We can just start sending our trash feeds to these plants. If the robots sift trash with the knowledge of an expert technician but cost 50 cents per hour to operate, it should be profitable for them to go through and occasionally find discarded electronics and machinery that are worth taking apart for profit.
We are following the OP. The fact that the OP is dreadfully wrong seems to be the problem.
Again:
What do you base your statement on?
Wall-E to the rescue!
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?
Unless you are feeding your garbage into a nuclear reaction.
Reality, would be my guess.
Look up plasma gasification.
The slag can be used as a building material.
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I would have quoted a successful, working plant for balance. But I couldn’t find one. Perhaps you could and share its secrets.
Oh, and notice that plasma gasification is limited to “combustible” waste, not metals and glass and other inorganics.
Absolutely. Airborne fine particulate matter (PM[sub]2.5[/sub], <2.5 microns) and ultrafine particulate matter (UFP, <100nm) are a public health problem, in part because they contain toxic metals like chromium, lead, and manganese.
There are waste incineration plants out there, and some of them even generate power. The Wikipedia article gives efficiency figures that seem amazingly high; my guess is they’re not including the energy content of the waste itself, but not energy input from the gas-fired burners that are incinerating said waste.
If we can collect metals from the waste after it’s burned, why don’t we extract the metals before it’s burned? And the glass?
Like I said, we already have methods for separating recyclables. We don’t need to burn everything first.
Or if recycling is too much work for you, just dump all that shit into a landfill and leave it for future generations.
They tried that in Albany back in the 80s. They were supposed to burn trash and use the heat to create electricity. The big issue was what to do with the ash, which had concentrated heavy metals in it, among other things. Then something went wrong and it spewed soot all over the city for a couple of days until they could shut it down.
They stopped using it in 1994.