The Oil Drum

82 comments on Calling All Ethanol Proponents

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assystems on June 11, 2007 - 1:45am

I've thought quite a lot about municipal solid waste. Here in Seattle the dumps contain something like 80% construction debris. Of that, probably half is stuff like gypsum board. What is not construction debris is very low grade. I don't know if there are areas with "better" garbage, so to speak, but it really seems to me that garbage is hard to deal with.

Any kind of fresh vegetative biomass with high water content is hard to transport even very short distances, so we are sort of down to wood byproducts (sawdust, mill scraps, perhaps some direct line on sorted construction debris, and paper).

What about tree services? Does anyone know how many tons of wood chips are removed per day from a large city? Where do they go? Do they get paid for the chips, or are they a disposal problem? Large infrastructure projects always rip out large numbers of trees - where do they go?

Big construction firms pay huge dump fees. They can recycle clean wood, but perhpas if one were to allow free dumping of non-clean wood it might encourage them to supply you, but then how could you deal with it? How can one grind up a big timber that is full of bolts, drift pins, steel brackets, and is covered with lead paint?

One thing that has crossed my mind several times is whether there are specialty institutions that have better waste streams? Prisons? Postal service? Old phone books? Somewhere there is the ticket, but the trick is to find it.

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Robert Rapier on June 11, 2007 - 2:48am

I have said several times over the past few days that I have seen a least a hundred of these proposals, and only 2 or 3 of them looked like very good ideas. Of the 2 or 3, one of the other good ideas is your proposal. That's why I have helped you with it - I think it can succeed. I think the Choren process in Germany - and I have had a lot of interactions with them - has high potential but I think the capital costs right now are out of sight. And that process may fall victim to receding horizons. So while it is a good idea in principle, it may not be ultimately feasible.

There are other processes, like Robert Rohatensky's SHPEGS system:

http://energytower.org/

That appear to me to be good ideas. But I don't have the expertise in that particular area to judge it. So you won't hear me weighing in on that one. I mostly just watch from the sidelines as the merits are debated. But no doubt, at least 95% of the stuff I see is immediately discardable. No further evaluation required.