Counterpoint to "conventional wisdom" about the incinerator

[Huggybear]

Interesting - not the editorial, but that a Columbia University study showed that switching from the incinerator to landfills would worsen air quality.

http://detnews.com/article/20090504/...o-burn-garbage

The impact would be from burning coal to service Detroit's steam-heated businesses and the diesel emissions from trucks carrying garbage to landfills.

[Strathcona]

They should have put the incinerator in a different part of town... Who puts an smelly incinerator in the middle of a city?

[Huggybear]

They should have put the incinerator in a different part of town... Who puts an smelly incinerator in the middle of a city?

The same people who put housing projects at the corners of the central business district?

[Bearinabox]

So the News thinks our future is as a city without a recycling program, then?

[Novine]

One problem I have with the study as it's presented is that it doesn't talk at all about the impact on the areas around the incinerator. It also doesn't talk about the types of pollution generated. No one wants more air pollution. But what comes out of an incinerator smokestack isn't the same same as what comes out of a diesel truck and equating the two based on volume alone is bad science.

[kraig]

So the News thinks our future is as a city without a recycling program, then?

I didn't notice anything in the story that spoke against recycling. Even when the city recycles, you're still going to have trash that needs to be disposed of. While the article raises some very valid points, I can't help but notice that it didn't speak to how much the cost of incinerating the trash is compared to dumping it. I hope someone can clarify this for me. But, doesn't the City of Detroit pay somewhere around $190.00+ per ton to incinerate which is around 10 times more than what the rest of the area pays to dump?

I'll try to research it myself, but, I know there are some Forum Members that could practically do a Master's Thesis on this subject.

[Bearinabox]

I didn't notice anything in the story that spoke against recycling. Even when the city recycles, you're still going to have trash that needs to be disposed of.

What I've read is that removing all recyclables from the waste stream makes burning so inefficient as to be impractical, since recyclables as a group burn more efficiently than non-recyclables, and having recyclables in the mix helps the rest of the trash burn more completely. The more successful a recycling program is in the city, the less efficiently the incinerator will operate.

Also, doesn't the city's current contract specify that anything picked up at curbside has to go to the incinerator? Is there any reason to think that a renewed contract would be any different?

[Huggybear]

Recycling is not the future. Reducing consumption is.

Recycling saves a very small amount of virgin material - and if there were a shortage of petroleum, wood pulp, or sand, people would be buying it out of the waste stream - like they did with newspaper in the 1970s. But as it stands, we have plenty of material from which to make plastics, paper, and glass.

Aside from the virgin materials issue, does recycling have anything to offer over incineration? Recycling and incineration both prevent items from hitting landfills. But remember that recycling is a manufacturing process.

1. Recycling takes significant energy, all of which is generated by fossil fuels. For example, recycling a plastic bottle takes many times the energy required to make a new plastic bottle. Incineration, if done on the right scale, generates energy.
2. Transporting waste to distant processing centers burns fossil fuel. It doesn't go as far when incinerated.
3. Some of the steps preparatory to recycling, like rinsing plastic bottles, can put phosphates into water supplies. This doesn't happen when you burn the bottles.
4. The manufacture of materials from recycled raw materials, such as bleaching recycled paper, still generates contamination. Dioxin is dioxin.
5. Many products of recycling are not themselves recyclable - especially when it comes to plastics. You might turn soda bottles into milk crates, but the milk crates are not recyclable.
6. People rationalize consumption by recycling.

And anyone who thinks land-filling Detroit's waste is in any way a sound strategy is probably blissfully ignorant. Landfilling emits methane, a greenhouse gas, threatens groundwater, and creates sites that have to be monitored for all time. The tipping charges that are paid for landfilling do not account for massive future costs. Instead, they go into the pockets of landfill owners who will be long gone when the landfill starts leaching toxins. The ash that comes out of an incinerator becomes filler for cement and becomes inert.

So the News thinks our future is as a city without a recycling program, then?