Paul Gilman wants your trash. Gilman isn’t a hoarder, and he maintains an admirable standard of personal cleanliness. But when he passes the dumpsters linked up at the end of driveways on trash day, filled with unwanted garbage to be taken to a landfill, all he sees is waste. To Gilman, chief sustainability officer at Covanta Energy, garbage represents an untapped and surprisingly clean source of energy.
The world is drowning in garbage. Between squalid dumps outside of slums, landfills tucked away into economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, and the tons of plastic endlessly circulating in the ocean, our trash is polluting every last nook and cranny of the planet. At the same time, humanity is using up the world’s fossil fuels at an ever faster clip, throwing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and depleting reserves of oil and coal. Gilman and advocates of waste-to-energy approaches believe that they can solve both problems simultaneously.
Covanta is one of the world’s biggest companies specializing in waste-to-energy, essentially burning garbage at high temperatures to produce steam and create electricity. Rid your mind of the incinerators of old, Gilman emphasizes. These are no pollution-heavy behemoths belching toxins into the air. Scrubbers remove chemicals like dioxins and furans, and less garbage in landfills means less methane in the atmosphere. It also means fewer carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.
“This gives us the ability to produce electricity from garbage with fewer emissions than from making electricity from coal,” Gilman says.
Many agree with Gilman and Covanta. Dubai is currently building a waste-to-energy plant valued at $2 billion, and cities around the world are joining in. The U.S. is currently home to 84 waste-to-energy plants, and more are being built, promising a dual solution to both our energy and our trash problem.
Not everyone is buying it. Monica Wilson, program manager at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, says these claims are, well, rubbish. “I think they’re wrong,” she says. “They’re turning one problem into a host of others,” such as air pollution and a continual reliance on disposable products.
Humans aren’t actually addressing the source of the problem, Wilson says. Only by reducing waste and increasing recycling and composting will we ever be able to manage our garbage issues.
Burning trash is one of humanity’s oldest approaches to garbage, along with flinging unwanted materials aside. When humans were relatively scarce and didn’t produce much trash, these options did the trick. New York City’s solution was to dump its waste into the ocean, which worked well until everything washed back up on shore. Although the city stopped dumping its solid waste in the 1870s, it would continue dumping sewage sludge into the ocean for more than 100 years.
To read the full story, visit http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-trash-solution-our-garbage-woes-or-are-advocates-just-blowing-smoke-180959924/?no-ist.