Could Australian recycling scheme solve our landfill problems?

[Doondoo]

The Lancashire town of Leyland is hardly a monument to cutting-edge technology. It is best remembered for the car plant that became a symbol to the industrial turmoil that plagued Britain in the 1970s. Perhaps that's why the locals were none too impressed to hear, a few months back, that their locality had been earmarked for a plant where all Lancashire's domestic waste would soon be processed. The county produces 775,000 tons of the stuff a year, so it certainly sounded as if Leyland was being dumped on from a great height in return for a few badly needed jobs.

But when Greenpeace celebrates the kind of technology that is to be used on the county's rubbish in a report on "cool waste", and Friends of the Earth positively purrs about the prospect of the plant (which, despite the protests, has just been approved by Lancashire County Council) then something must be afoot.

The environmentalists are interested because the Lancashire plant's operator is Global Renewables Limited (GRL). The firm is a subsidiary of an old Australian mining company that decided several years ago to investigate whether the techniques it was using to extract diamonds, gold and tin from the earth could be applied to remove recyclable commodities from the mountains of waste that were dotted across its vast nation. (When it comes to rubbish, the Australians are in a field of their own. Only the US throws out more household waste than Australia. The colossal garbage tip south of Sydney, which is 50m high, provides a more spectacular view than even the Sydney Harbour Bridge.)

The Australians found that where there was muck, there was, indeed, brass. Working on the age-old mining principle that the more reusable materials it could separate out, the more profit it could make, it built the southern hemisphere's largest waste facility - Eastern Creek - where it recycles virtually all of the waste it receives and - here's the groundbreaking bit - incinerates none of it. It is considered by many environmentalists to be the first firm to view waste as a mineable resource rather than something to be destroyed.


(see the link for specifics on how the process works)
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2272189.ece

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. I remember reading about a prototype plant doing this in the US

decades ago. I figured they would be all up and running in the US by 1980 at the latest. As I recall, they "mined" out all recyclables, then composted the rest. And yes, it is still a good idea and it still needs to be done.

[crikkett]

3. when I was a kid

and watching all the environmental disaster documentaries in the mid/late 70s I decided that people would be mining garbage dumps in my lifetime. I wonder if I thought it myself or picked it up from something I heard.

Jimmy Carter was my favorite president because he asked us all to find ways to do better for our planet. That, and presidents are heroes to kids, I guess. For fun, when I was 7, I wrote letters to Jimmy Carter with my ideas (drawings and all!) for conserving the planet. They were all obvious of course, and included the mine-the-garbage-dumps idea. But my mom mailed them in for me and a while later, they sent me a neat packet about the white house and how to be the President and a thank-you form letter (with a genuine printed signature and gold-foil presidential seal!) that I kept until I was a teenager.

Mr. Carter's still my favorite President, a man of principles.

[Igel]

4. There was something vaguely like that SE of Baltimore

in the '70s.

It extracted metals (ferrous and non-ferrous) from the waste stream, removed glass and a few other things, and then used the organic waste to generate heat for running the danged plant.

Sounded like a good idea (even if everything dealing with trash, waste, stink, and pollution in Baltimore County was in the SE portion of the county). But it kept breaking down ... After spending more time being repaired than being in operation, they mothballed it.

[NNadir]

2. It is unsurprising that Greenpeace puts faith in garbage.

At least they're consistent.

The best solution to garbage is to make less of it. While it may seem that I am simply bashing the Greenpeace website in calling for less garbage, I am also talking about physical garbage as well.

Greenpeace, where scientific literacy is frowned upon, claims that it is <em>opposed</em> to garbage burning, even though burning garbage represents a significant portion of the "renewable" energy that they so like to present as a "success."

In the electricity sector in the United States, burning "biomass" provided 508 trillion BTU's of energy (0.0005 exajoules), and of this 61% was burning "garbage." Yet Greenpeace wants to tell you that burning "biomass" is a grand success, even when they claim to oppose the bulk of it.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/biomass/biomass.html

Further, they seem to have completely ignored - and how surprising is this? - whether or not the garbage being that is alleged to "produce 33% more carbon dioxide" than the filthy fuel natural gas when burned, might in fact, release carbon dioxide and methane if it is not burned.

A Greenpeace endorsement is hardly something to recommend a technology.