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quote:
Originally posted by james weatherford
As of June 18, 2014: http://hawaiitribune-herald.com/news/loc...n-facility
"A waste-to-energy incinerator will be the solution to Hawaii County’s garbage problems, judging by a list of finalists released Tuesday for the project.
All three companies making the short list specialize in mass-burn incineration, with garbage combusted to produce power to sell to electric companies."
And this just tells me that the technology isn't there yet to do anything but burn the waste that we can't recycle or compost.
The county advertised for proposals that would not cost the tax payers any money.
Burn baby burn !!!
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The county advertised for proposals that would not cost the tax payers any money.
I am pretty sure it will not work out that way.
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Last time I checked, incinerators that burn plastic emit dioxin. Have things changed?
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Odd that, if "burn baby burn" is the only option available, then somebody needs to tell the rest of the USA where burning and burying discards has been on the decline since last century. The number of incinerators has declined and the amount of discards burned has declined. Meanwhile, the amount of discards recycled and composted has steadily increased over the same period. Source: US EPA, "Municipal Solid Waste in the United States:2011 Facts and Figures".
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Of course the number of incinerators has declined.At one time nearly every city in the United States had a smoke and pollution belching incinerator.
My parents had one in their basement.
We are talking about a new technology,properly designed,pollution free incinerator.
In Utah,the army designed and operated a burn facility that destroyed our stockpile of chemical weapons.Some of the stuff they burned was so dangerous that one drop could kill thousands.The plant is now being dismantled.
If the technology exists that can destroy nerve agents,surely a safe trash incinerator can be built.
You can only recycle so much.The rest has to go somewhere.I guess we can just keep burying it in an unlined landfill !!
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quote:
Originally posted by Obie
Of course the number of incinerators has declined.At one time nearly every city in the United States had a smoke and pollution belching incinerator.
My parents had one in their basement.
We are talking about a new technology,properly designed,pollution free incinerator.
In Utah,the army designed and operated a burn facility that destroyed our stockpile of chemical weapons.Some of the stuff they burned was so dangerous that one drop could kill thousands.The plant is now being dismantled.
If the technology exists that can destroy nerve agents,surely a safe trash incinerator can be built.
You can only recycle so much.The rest has to go somewhere.I guess we can just keep burying it in an unlined landfill !!
Very good point, that even the US has the capability to design and build an incinerator system to burn nerve gas and poison gas with exhaust scrubbers.
What do some people think is the alternative? This, when Hawaii was a laughing stock of the whole planet with a garbage barge not wanted in Hawaii, not wanted on the mainland and was forced to float around for months.
quote:
http://www.invw.org/2010/01/shrink-wrapp...l-near-you
Shrink-wrapped bales of Hawaiian garbage headed for the Columbia River and a landfill near you
JANUARY 11, 2010
It is true in the early days of incinerators, which go back to 1900 (their numbers are only declining in the US, Sweden and Japan have hundreds of waste-to-energy plants), there were severe environmental problems from raw exhaust being pumped into the atmosphere. This is 2014, not 1970, which seems to be a very difficult concept for many Punatics to comprehend.
The fact today is the methane and other gases from landfills far exceed the EPA monitored quality of exhaust from waste-to-energy plants. Not only that, all landfills get rained on, that water mixes with all kinds of landfill toxins and that leeches into the ground, eventually leaking out into the ocean and rivers, nearby properties. How is that better? Also, all the talk about recycling is just that, all talk, at least in the US. The US is the worst country for recycling, even beating Australians that feel they have enough space for landfills and have no interest in waste-to-energy.
quote:
Only one percent of the waste generated by Swedish households ends up in landfill as compared to the average 38 percent for European nations and over 50 percent for the United States.
Landfills release considerable amounts of greenhouse gases (GHG)—methane being the most prominent—into the atmosphere. The figure can skyrocket if enough care is not taken during waste segregation; the higher the amount of biodegradable waste—refuse that decomposes naturally, with or without oxygen—the higher the GHG emission. By substituting landfills with incinerators, Sweden has reduced the GHG emission of its waste sector by 30 percent in less than two decades.
"This island Hawaii on this island Earth"
*Japanese tourist on bus through Pahoa, "Is this still America?*
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The decline in number has been in the very same so-called waste-to-energy technology being proposed here. This is NOT new technology.
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This is fixing a symptom rather than the cause. And a very inefficient fix for the symptom at that.
I would rather see education to make people aware of their actions in relation to the ecosystem / planet. I think people need to be able to make the choice willingly rather than through force for actual progress or change to occur.
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Ive always thought the retailers selling said about to become garbage - should have the responsibility to take back the left overs.... tossing a bag of garbage into a store dumpster seemingly become a crime.
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It's unfortunate that the world has become a "throwaway" society, and everything is now wrapped in "convenient individual servings" with plastic. I am still confused when the first oil embargo happened and president Jimmy Carter ( yes, I'm that old!) professed in a speech that "we need to reduce our dependency on oil, and oil based products". Somehow that was a green light for suppliers to take oil cans, which were made out of cardboard, and convert to plastic, and the individual wrapped product came along with it.
If the nations people as a whole took a specific day and "flash mobbed" the store that they bought the over plasticized product and dumped the waste at their loading docks it might get their attention as to how much waste there really is in this method of packaging. What's wrong with buying a big cut of meat, cutting it up and packaging yourself like a butcher would, recycling the butcher wrap in the compost pile, or re using your own plastic freezer bag?
Are you a human being, or a human doing?
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