Burn the plastic

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Tero
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Burn the plastic

Post by Tero » Mon Sep 24, 2018 11:22 am

Burn the trash too, but mostly the plastic, as it just sits in landfill forever. It just takes the place of coal that we burn anyway and it has higher H percentage than coal which is over 90% carbon.

Chemical and Engineering News:

In Rahway, N.J., near Route 1&9, looming cooling towers and a huge white smokestack dwarf the nearby car dealerships, fast-food joints, and motels. The installation is visible for miles and is a familiar landmark to the highway’s regulars, but likely few of them know what is going on inside.
The structure is the Union County Resource Recovery Facility, a waste-to-energy facility that Covanta operates on behalf of the local government. Instead of the usual coal or natural gas, it burns garbage to make electricity.

Inside, a parade of garbage trucks from all around the county tilt their loads onto the facility’s floor. What comes in is the assorted dross the local citizenry throws out that isn’t suited for paper, metal, and plastics recycling bins. Workers bulldoze unwanted toys, old
pillows, broken furniture, and heaps of plastic garbage bags into a 10-meter-deep pit. Two steel claws the size of delivery vans mix the pile like two gigantic hands tossing a salad.

“The person running the cranes is critical,” says Michael Van Brunt, senior director of sustainability at Covanta. “Coal comes in at a certain spec. You know what you are buying has consistent thermal properties. For us, it can vary by load, so we mix it for consistency.”

After the operator has sufficiently homogenized the mass, the claws grab heaps of the stuff and drop it into a hopper feeding three furnaces that incinerate the trash at 1,100 °C. They can process 1,400 metric tons of waste daily. The boilers generate steam heated to 450 °C, powering turbines with a capacity of 42 MW, enough for 30,000 homes.

The plant extracts more than just energy from the garbage. Its magnets and eddy current separators recover the ferrous and nonferrous metals that end up in household trash. At the end of the process, the resulting ash, about 10% of the garbage’s original volume, heads for landfills.

Two-thirds of the carbon in the trash is derived from biomass such as food and wood. Plastics compose the other third. In the U.S., discarded plastic is far more likely to end up in a landfill or a facility like Covanta’s than it is to be recycled.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans recycled only 9.1% of their plastics in 2015. Waste-to-energy facilities combusted 15.5%. But the most likely destination for the plastics discarded in the U.S. is the landfill. It is the final resting place for three-quarters of it.

The public is fed up with plastic waste. It’s haunted by pictures of tropical beaches littered with plastic bags and tortoises entangled in six-pack rings. And most people realize that we are growing more and more dependent on plastics, especially hard-to-recycle varieties such as single-use

flexible food packaging.
Adding to the crisis, the Chinese government has shut down imports of waste plastics, breaking the U.S. and Europe of their habit of baling up garbage and sending it out of sight and out of mind across the sea. The plastic is piling up.

In response, municipalities are installing equipment to sort waste better. Industry is trying to improve the recycling system to handle more plastic and fold the results into more new products. Desperate to look responsive, politicians are resorting to bans of single-use plastics such as straws, cutlery, and polystyrene foam containers.

Yet despite good intentions, recycling and banning won’t keep enough plastic out of the landfill to solve the plastic waste problem. Some people involved argue that extracting energy from plastic—in both waste-to-energy facilities and plastics-fed fuel refineries—will need to be part of a solution that keeps our old plastics out of the landfill.

Marco Castaldi, director of the Earth Engineering Center at the City College of New York, says improving recycling will be tough and probably can’t address all the plastic waste piling up. He points out that the U.S. municipalities leading the pack are still achieving only a 30% recycling rate. Waste-to-energy furnaces, pyrolysis plants, and other energy extraction schemes are needed to finish the job. “Thermal conversion processes are going to have to be engaged,” Castaldi says.
https://cen.acs.org/environment/sustain ... rgy/96/i38
https://cen.acs.org/
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

User avatar
Tero
Just saying
Posts: 47195
Joined: Sun Jul 04, 2010 9:50 pm
About me: 15-32-25
Location: USA
Contact:

Re: Burn the plastic

Post by Tero » Mon Sep 24, 2018 11:25 am

They give you three free articles a month. Article on plastic in the ocean
https://cen.acs.org/materials/polymers/ ... mpaign=CEN
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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