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GAIA Host Collective
I was thinking today about all the yard debris and wood trash we produce. Would localized plants to convert this material be possible or would incineration for electricity be more efficient? I just strikes me that in the future our grass clippings and fall leaves may be more valuable.
Matt
You could convert this kind of stuff into ethanol, but it would be far more efficient to convert it to electricity, or use it directly for heat and displace coal or natural gas.
RR
Wood is easy to burn in a stove, but leaves and grass mostly smoke and they don't store well. Do you know of any process currently used for this material? As far as ethanol from the stuff at what point would it be economical for a company to remove curbside trash for free to convert and sell?
matt
RR
Composting! I would have thought most municipal dumps would separate compostable materials, simply to save landfill space?
Conventional agriculture harvests crops from fields and replaces the non-renewable nutrients removed by the process with fertilizers of various kinds. When a homeowner (stupidly) cuts their lawn and gathers up leaves just to ship the "waste" to a landfill, they too have to replace the nutrients removed with fertilizers.
Better systems would use "smaller loops" to return the nutrients to the soil. With the homeowner, a mulching lawn-mower (or better yet, a reel mower) and a compost bin results in a tight loop. For the farmer, going vertical and doing as much on-farm processing can keep much of the nutrients on the farm (as "waste" by-products of processing) so that they can be spread back on the fields. I often see trucks headed for the landfill with stuff that I'd rather see dumped on my property so that I could spread it on my fields, possibly after composting.
This is one of the reasons that I would liek to see a more agrarian lifestyle in the future. It has relatively tight nutrient loops. These smaller loops can have much smaller energy demand.
Seems to me that the energy in tree clippings and garden wastes is quite small, especially considering the high moisture content of these materials, so making compost is a better use. Composting is a process requiring very little capital expenditure and produces a useful product which replaces chemical fertilisers manufactured using natural gas.
I am glad to hear that. Unfortunately, I don't think this is the case for our dump. I could be wrong, but I have never heard anything about this. Heck, my city doesn't even require recycling, which I think is irresponsible for a city of 100,000 people.
RR
Some years ago, during the mid 1990's, our fair city of 70,000 souls decided to get out of the sanitation (garbage pickup and handling) business. They let all the sanitation workers go, sold their trucks, closed the various "drop off" dump sites located around the area (where you could take larger items, like old washing machines, etc), closed the city dump, and hired a private sanitation company to take over the duties, including trucking the garbage to a new facility 3 counties away (about 50 miles).
Everyone got a single new green plastic wheeled bin to put their trash in, instead of the self-provided trash cans of various types, and garbage pickup switched from twice a week to once a week. Additionally, non-household garbage (such as lawn debris) would now be collected every other week, instead of was now picked up once a month, instead of biweekly. On top of it all, everyone's sanitation bill went up nearly 20%.
The upside of it all was that this company gave everyone a small recycling bin, and was going to sort all garbage and recycle as much of it as possible, as part of their contract. They were even going to sell those recycled materials (such as aluminum, glass, newspaper, etc) for reuse. As a 'green' solution for the whole city, most applauded the effort.
Some years passed, and around 2003 it came to light that the recycling center operated by this sanitation company had been a revenue drain on the company, and they had closed it soon after it opened, years previously. Instead of sorting and recycling the materials collected by the city's citizenry, they had been simply been dumping it back in with all the other garbage.
Needless to say, our citizens were inscenced, they had been asked to pay more and accept less service in the name of the environment. Politicians ran around like chicken little. The city sued the company for breach of contract, to which it responded by going belly up (bankruptcy).
The city ended up hiring another sanitation company, which continues pretty much the same practices as its predecessor.
Those recycling bins are now mostly used to store gardening supplies and what have you.
Only problem is, there won't be enough for everyone, and the price will go up at some point (currently much cheaper than heating fuel). Also, in case the distribution network breaks down, it would need to be useable with manual loading (good old logs...)
Biomassone
These are going in all over Oregon. One is slated for my town that will create 25 MW of electricity and warm up LNG when it comes in.
clippings on the ground. Otherwise,
you wind up having to fertilize the
lawn using petro-chemicals. Of
course, just because it makes sense
to do this doesn't mean it will be
done. I know that lots of people
wind up capturing their grass
clippings and burning or dumping
them. That should be one more thing
that will have to come to an end
with peak oil. That's if people will
even bother with lawns. When you're
starving, it makes more sense to
grown crops in your yard instead
of grass, unless you want to graze
a cow.
the most efficient combustion fuels, from a gw standpoint, are natural gas, then oil, then coal, then biomass. so sure, you can burn it, but you'll get more co2 than you would had you generated the same power from natural gas.
(i really wish i could point to a table on this, but even thou i'm sure i've seen them, surfing now i can't find one.)
my sister, a chem-eng, now doing a bit of work in biofuels, had a good phrase ... something like "carbon prejudice" ... as people put more emotional value on one kind of carbon and not another.
from a chem standpoint carbon is carbon, and at the end of the day it only matters how many tons you burn, and how many you sequester. if you've got the nat gas - then burning that, and landfilling/sequestering waste puts you ahead, on a non-prejudiced carbon standpoint.
(But if you are only counting carbon/hydrogen ratio, then coal is definitely the worst.)
Many people get confused about carbon accounting... Burning trees does not release carbon, and planting trees does not capture it, unless the burnt trees will not grow back (desertification), or the planted trees would grow where none would grow naturally (de-desertification). And one must look at more than just the trees, e.g., the organic matter in the soil, that may build up -- or may rot. A mature forest may or may not be accumulating carbon, depends on the climate and species and soils. E.g., some northern areas accumulate peat, which does not rot due to coldness and wet anaerobic conditions underground. GW is causing some of this accumulation to rot now, a disasterous feedback loop.
I've read of a Dutch fossil fueled power plant that boasts its green-ness by venting the flue gases into greenhouses in which vegetables are grown, "sequestering" the carbon. Never mind that:
- the carbon is released once the vegetables are eaten and digested, and
- the same vegetables grown elsewhere would (temporarily) trap the same amount of carbon.
The same is true for the idea of bubbling the flue gases through ponds of algae. It's only of any advantage if the algae grow faster due to the added CO2. But the limiting factor is the sunshine (the energy source) these algae need to convert the CO2 back into carbohydrates. And as one makes the ponds wider but shallower there are tradeoffs in cost and land needed and materials and energy for piping the gases - for a marginal benefit, as algae can grow without those gases.If we limited ourselves to burning only the carbon we can trap via photosynthesis in a closed loop, and left the fossil fuels in the ground (fat chance), we wouldn't be causing GW. That is only possible with a stable population and a steady-state economy.
net-net, burning gat gas and incarcerating biomass puts you ahead.
i understand that with a narrow scope my mesquite charcoal is neutral ... but it could be carbon prejudice to be that narrow.
this closed loop stuff assumes one glaring thing: that you can power everything with closed loop sources. when you are force (by consumption) to burn a mix of fossil and fresh biofuels it should become a question of which is the optimal mix.
"(But if you are only counting carbon/hydrogen ratio, then coal is definitely the worst.)"
i really think i saw numbers that put biomass beyond coal on the carbon line ... but i think the lack of mercury in biomass could put it ahead of coal on that basis.