Waste Management the nation’s largest landfill company, with 273 landfills nation wide wants to work with Bend-based InEnTec, to turn 25 tons a day of Portland trash into fuel. Waste Management plans on doing this through vaporizing the trash at a temperature of up to 20,000 degrees, and then the solid waste turns to a liquid fuel much like ethanol.
Waste Management and InEnTec want to build the plant on Waste Management’s Columbia Ridge Landfill in Gilliam County. Waste Management’s goal is to be the first plant in the United States to process city waste from heating trash and converting it to gas. A process that has been coined “plasma gasification.” Representative from Waste Management stated, “the process reduces the volume of waste by 100 to 1. This basically takes the action that happens in a landfill over 30 years and complete it in seconds”.
I found this article interesting because I think it is a creative new strategy to handling our waste. This article shows corporate responsibility by a landfill company trying to find ways to be more sustainable and finding new ways to use are waste instead of just burying it or burning it.
I appreciate that Waste Management is trying to find ways to reuse waste, but I’m concerned that this process will still have harmful effects against the environment. My main concern is if they are trying to convert Portland trash to fuel, then why is the plant so far away from Portland? Having to ship the waste such a great distance is using a lot of fuel, the resources they are trying to create, and further degrading the environment through vehicle emissions. I am also curious about how much energy is needed and used to convert trash to fuel, and if this process distributes large amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere.
In the article they brought up a few concerns the general public has about this new proposed project. The concern of Joseph Miller, a board member for Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, is that projects and technologies that let us burn or convert waste to fuel is a disincentive to recycle, compost, and move towards a zero-waste society. I don’t necessarily agree with this, because I think people will continue to recycle, but I do feel it is a valid point and concern that needs to be considered.
http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2010/07/waste_management_and_inentec_p.html
I think this is an interesting idea. I like the fact that Waste Management is working to find a way to reuse the waste and limit what goes into the landfills. You do raise a good point of it being further away and what effects it could have on the environment. I do not believe that they can completely turn into a zero-waste society either.
ReplyDeleteReduce, reuse, recycle! Even in spite of humanity's wasting of resources we can still redeem ourselves. For us to create a sustainable future we can't just be thinking about our future, but also our past, past waste, past environmental problems, past abuses that we must make right before we move forward. If we can reuse the massive mountains of waste, then we might actually stand a chance for the future. Responsible living is not just something for tomorrow, but something for today and yesterday!
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