Why hasn’t anyone invented a way to somehow collect all the particulates, residue, noxious vapors, and whatnot that would result from incinerating every last bit of our garbage?
All this material could then be compressed into a chunk of irreducible matter that would presumably be a LOT smaller than the original volume of trash.
Somebody please point out to me why this wouldn’t work. Or would it?
To trap particulate matter, a large mass of filtering screens would be necessary. Those filters would probably get clogged up pretty fast and need to be replaced quite often. Now you’ve got thousands of cubic yards of fiberglass (or whatever) filters that need to be disposed of daily.
Lots of gaseous byproducts, too. I imagine that capturing all of these before they escape into the atmosphere is difficult and costly. It’s probably better just to let nature take care of recycling the refuse via decomposition, etc. The problem is, we’re making more of a mess than nature can handle. If we inject artificial means of biodegredation, we draw even more resources out of the earth to accomplish this.
You can dispose of refuse in two main ways. One (for biodegradeable matter): grind up the matter into fine slivers so as to increase the surface area over which microbes can attack and metabolize it. Composting is an example. Two: Apply energy to alter the chemical properties of the matter and turn it into something that is biodegradeable. This is what incineration does.
Ideally we would like to be able to mimic what nature does to refuse, but be able to do it better and faster. Because soon we will reach a point where our byproducts can’t be broken down fast enough for mother earth to turn back into resources for us to consume again.
So you take a small piece of plastic, you incinerate it and make it into a big problem? Why not just handle the small piece of plastic? Why turn it into noxious gases? What kind of simplification is that?
The gases are waste too. Sure, if we incinerate the stuff and let the CO2 and H2O escape to the atmosphere no big problem. But there will be all sorts of other gasses given off that aren’t so benign, and those gasses are going right up the smokestack into your lungs, then to precipitate down wherever the wind takes them. How do you separate the noxious vapors from the benign vapors? You can’t just trap the smoke in a big bag and bury the bag, for crying out loud.
Okay, so maybe a rephrase of the question is in order:
Is there any way known to science to collect and condense particulates as small as vapor particles? I’m not talking about filters here. I’m talking about just gathering it all into a bundle, by itself.
I think a product like the Ionic Breeze can handle larger-sized particles like ash or dust without resorting to a filter.
I fully realize all the harmful stuff that would escape into the atmosphere, using current incineration technology.
But I’m talking about some technology that may not yet exist.
Not necessarily. See the Ionic Breeze link above. I can imagine a large-scale ionic air filter grabbing all the ash and whatnot, then you could scoop it into a bag or something.
Why not? Maybe the technology isn’t there yet, but to me this does not seem outside the realm of possibility.
True, but how much of that smoke is particulate matter that could be condensed into something the size of , say, a sugar cube?
I suppose the answer to my OP is: We just don’t know how to do it. And while we’re working on that problem, let’s figure out how to remove all that pesky empty space between subatomic particles!
I always thought it was an interesting concept, though.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Jpeg Jones *
Why hasn’t anyone invented a way to somehow collect all the particulates, residue, noxious vapors, and whatnot that would result from incinerating every last bit of our garbage?
[QUOTE]
For the same reason no one has invented yet a cure for cancer or free energy or a way to implant knowledge in our brains without effort. Feel free to try to find the answer to the question you pose or to any of the other thousands which still await.
sailor, a guy can dream, can’t he? While you’re dismounting from your extremely tall horse, why don’t you re-read my last post where I admit that the technology just isn’t there.
I maintain that it wasn’t as dumb a question as you imply.
But if you could trap every particle and all the gas, and find some way to compress it, what was the point of burning it all anyway?
You’re probably better off developing some technology that simply makes it easy to compress, rather than trying to catch the gas.
OK, you’re misunderstanding the term “vapor”. Smoke isn’t just particulates. When you burn, say, wood you are mostly giving off CO2 and H2O. These are gases. The “particles” are the size of one molecule. We do have filters that can stop substances that small. Like plastic. Trouble is, they trap everything, and you’ve got a giant balloon of hot CO2 and water vapor. And of course, there are all sorts of volatiles given off by incomplete combustion…CO, methane, aldehydes, ketones, etc etc. Burning plastics produces all sorts of chlorine containing organics. These are single molecules being given off. There isn’t much you can do about them except try to keep the burn as rich as possible for complete combustion to minimize them. As for particulates (soot), yes you could scrub the smokestack for particulates, they do that all the time in industry. But it costs money. And of course, a large fraction of our waste stream is not combustable, since it is glass, construction debris, etc, or marginally combustable since it is full of water.
The big thing is to keep as much as possible out of the waste stream in the first place. Recycle the plastics, recycle the metals, recycle the paper, compost the food and yard waste.
Conservation of matter seems to be the overriding problem here - burning things doesn’t make them disappear, neither does it make them smaller, it just spreads them around - as panamajack said - what is the point of that?
Well, maybe I’m laboring under some misconceptions about the nature of combustion. I thought a whole lot of the matter being burned goes away in the form of heat harmless gasses, leaving much less stuff to deal with. That was the whole point of my little scheme: Much Less Stuff.
Of course, if what you’re left with is vastly more dangerous stuff, just less of it, then indeed there’s no point.
No; the matter doesn’t go away at all (not unless you’re using some sort of nuclear process) - there may be less solids at the end than before (or in some cases, there may be more).
All that changes is chemical bonds - some of the matter tied up in solids turns into the noxious gases that you plan to trap - at the end, you still have exactly the same mass* of matter, only some of it is now considerably harder to handle.
Put it on a cargo rocket and set the controls for the heart of the sun.
Garbage is incinerated in some places. In Japan we have separate garbage collection for combustible and non-combustible matter, and presumably the combustible garbage is sent straight to the incineration plant. There is one incineration plant near where I live and I don’t see any visible smoke or detectable odor, so they must be pretty good at filtering the particulates and noxious substances. A few years ago it was found that small incinerators produce dioxin, and many of them were shut down. They say large-scale incineration plants use high enough temperature to break down dioxin into harmless substances.
I’d guess that landfills are cheaper in the US than in Japan, so it makes no economical sense to operate incineration plants in the US.
Electrostatic precipitators are pretty good at catching particulates, and there are many types of mechanical filters as well. As for gases, you could pass them through scrubbers and such… but one of the problems with combustion chemistry is that it isn’t as well understood as other branches; which is mostly to do with the nature of what you’re burning.
No two loads are the same chemically. You’ll have different compounds going in, different ratios, water contents, which may or may not undergo complete combustion, and the end result is a very unpredictable mixture of gases coming out the stack. You may also get new compounds being formed depending on what’s in the garbage mixture so even if you set up scrubbers to take out certain gases, there may well be others formed that you don’t have a scrubber for.
The problem arises when they get out. A hunk of plastic sitting in a landfill isn’t going anywhere; that hunk turned to gases can just float away.
Garbage incineration is done in the US, some cities deal with all their garbage that way, and generate electricity with the waste heat. And yes, you do end up with much less going to landfills. The pollution control issue is what keeps it from becoming more prevalent.
One other concern though is once you collect all those harmful byproducts, what do you do with the now concentrated waste? If you turn 100 tones of garabge into 500lbs of ash, just what’s in that ash? You can’t put it in an ordinary landfill; most likely you’ll need a special waste disposal site for it. Whereas when it was “diluted” through that 100 tons, you could jam it into any old dump.
Actually, all of the “old dumps” are very rapidly disappearing. All new landfills are required to have elaborate liner systems to keep “leachate” from getting into the environment (especially the groundwater).
As far as ash residue landfills, I happen to be working as we speak on such a landfill in Connecticut. (I am an environmental engineer.) The requirements for the liner of an ash residue landfill are slightly less stringent than for a typical trash landfill. Until fairly recently, ash could be disposed of in unlined dumps.
Actually, you’ll probably have more mass, because (one) definition of combustion is the combination of a substance with oxygen. So you’ve got the extra mass of oxygen from the air.
IIRC Antoine Lavoisier discovered this over 300 years ago. Before that, the “phlogiston theory” proposed that combustible substances were not pure, but were combined with stuff called phlogiston. Then when you burnt them the phlogiston was given off, resulting in the pure substance, which looked remarkably like ash.
Then Mr L pointed out that stuff actually gets heavier when it burns - at least when you take into account any gaseous products. “Ah ha!” said the phlogiston pholks, “phlogiston must have negative mass! Hold the front page!”
“Er, well, it might do…” said Antoine, for nothing escaped him, “or alternatively, stuff combines with a gas out of the air - hmm, let’s call it oxygen.” He probably then went on to perform the regularly debunked candle in a jar experiment.
At least, I think that’s how it happened. I wasn’t there.
**mmmiiikkkeee
** – You could still dilute the ash with the normal refuse in a land fill. Why would you need a seperate landfill for the ash? Just mix it in with the rest.
Brief correction… that should say “over 200 years ago”. Lavoisier was doing this stuff in the 1770s.
We don’t have this solution because of the conspriracy of oil barons, landfill owners and enviromental groups. Such a technique would greatly hurt their interests.