Garbage and Landfills: Thinking Before Dumping

by Ray Grigg
Shades of Green
27-Oct-2008

News Item: CUMBERLAND EYED FOR HUGE NEW GARBAGE DUMP. Village may have to take waste from Campbell River and Comox Valley (Campbell River Courier Islander, Oct. 3/08).

Every community must eventually confront its garbage, the waste that seems to be proliferating by volume and toxicity in direct proportion to the rise in consumerism. Aside from reducing our consumption to create less garbage, the next wisest strategy is to recycle everything - this is "going well" in the Strathcona and the Comox Valley Regional Districts but apparently not well enough. Now, faced with 72,000 tonnes of annual garbage for disposal, their reflexive response is to collect it and dump it in landfills.

The term "landfill" attempts to give an air of respectability to a practice that is little removed from archaic. At least "garbage dump" is honest. But the garbage is still dumped. And we now know that on a round planet, the garbage has a way of returning the garbage to us, in one devious form or another. As if to confirm this obvious danger, board members from the regional districts heard that the new landfill "would include a vast impermeable liner and other equipment [that] could be installed to handle potential pollutants and prevent contaminants leeching through to the soil and surrounding land" (Ibid.).

Adding to the toxic concoctions that would be flowing downward from the landfill is the methane gas that would be exuding upward as the garbage degrades. This gas has a warming effect about 20 times more potent than the carbon dioxide that is causing climate change. Carbon taxes on such greenhouse gases are inevitable, so unless this methane is caught and collected, communities will soon be paying for its escape ‹ either in dollars or in aberrant weather from global warming. Regardless, all garbage contains chemicals, minerals and energy that has economic value. Why not recover that value to make money, minimize environmental damage, reduce risk to our health, and assume an environmentally defensible ethical position at the same time?

Thoughtful and foresighted communities all over the planet are avoiding future problems for themselves and the rest of us by employing modern technology to process their garbage. These solutions usually require more research, planning and investment than landfills. But the rewards are obvious. And, since the two regional districts have established a "joint advisory committee" to "start planning how and where future waste will be handled" (Ibid.), perhaps the committee might begin by exploring options to landfills. The following are suggestions that the committee might consider. With a little time, effort and professional advice, they could find many more.

Thermal Depolymerization: This is a closed-system industrial process that "masticates" every imaginable kind of garbage, digests it under heat and pressure, and in a couple of hours distils the slurry into high-quality oil, industrial-grade minerals, pure water and clean-burning gas. The gas is used to power the system at efficiencies of 85 percent or higher, while the excess can be added to natural gas pipelines to heat homes or generate electricity. TDP, as the system is called, will process virtually anything that contains carbon: wood, tires, plastics, dredged muck, sewage, medical wastes, pulp-and-paper effluent, offal and carrion ‹ virtually all municipal garbage including biological weapons and anthrax spores. Even computers and refrigerators with their electronics and plastics can be shredded and digested into the same four elemental products. The beneficial prospects are countless. Tipping fees, the sale of excess gas and byproducts could even make such a project profitable.

Plasma Gasification: Two of these experimental plants exist in Japan, each processing about 30 tonnes of municipal garbage per day. Waste of all kinds is ground and then injected into a gas and electric "plasma" heat of 6,000° C. The result is a "molecular dissociation", like TDP, that converts the waste into "syngas", metals and slag. The metals can be recycled and the slag, which looks like obsidian and is 5% of the input volume, can be blown in its hot state into rock wool, an inert insulative material that is twice as resistant to heat transfer as fibreglass. The syngas can be cleaned by scrubbers, then used to either operate the system or go to natural gas pipelines for domestic uses. Excess heat and gas generated by the system - it is about 50% efficient - can be used with turbines to produce electricity.

Bio Recovery: Several companies now convert organic garbage into soil-enhancing fertilizers or useable gas. International Bio Recovery (www.ibrcorp.com), with licensed projects throughout the world, processes mixed organic wastes into safe, high quality agricultural nutrients. StormFisher Biogas uses technology - about 5,000 facilities now operate in Europe - to transform organic waste into commercial-grade gas that can be added to natural gas pipelines for domestic and industrial energy. Either of these processes could be coupled with sophisticated recycling facilities to replicate San Francisco's recycling success: 69% presently, 75% by 2010 and 100% by 2020. San Francisco uses a three-bin household sorting system: blue for paper, bottles and cans; green for food and yard wastes; and black for everything else (Econews, Oct/08). Plastic shopping bags and styrofoam food trays are required to be biodegradable and compostable - the non-recyclable kinds have been banned from use in the city so they don't enter the waste chain.

These options are a reminder that political will, smart thinking and a modicum of education can get us beyond landfills and all the risks they entail to ourselves and our environment. Campbell River and the Comox Valley have time enough to explore these and other options before their present landfills are full. With a little vision, research and wisdom, they could move us into a waste-free future.

Ray Grigg lives on Quadra Island. He writes Shades of Green, a weekly essay covering subjects of environmental and other public interest. His work is published in the Campbell River Islander, and his articles are available online at the Cumberlander, Shades of Green.