It’s the quest which has become ever more pressing as our backlog of unrecycled garbage grows and landfills close, choked with a rising tide of refuse: how can we convert our waste to something valuable?
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Converting the ever-increasing amounts of rubbish we produce into a reusable product, or reducing it to nothing without creating deadly emissions like dioxins and micro-ash, is the Holy Grail of governments, councils, businesses and community groups around the world.
Dealing with the toxic residues of the Twentieth Century is an enormous challenge. Asbestos, chemical and hazardous refuse from hospitals and laboratories, pesticides, lead-based products and by-products, fluorescent tubes and mercury waste, oil and petroleum by-waste, PCBs and other carcinogens – these are just a few of the myriad problematic issues that face us.
It’s a complex issue not solved quickly or by laypeople. It requires professional consideration and extremely precise long-term planning.
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The City of Ballarat is facing that enduring and troublesome dilemma now as it considers options for the proposed waste-to-energy plant at the Ballarat West Employment Zone (BWEZ).
With council currently sending 30,000 tonnes per annum of waste to landfill, part of the original BWEZ initiative was to create a standalone waste-to-energy plant.
After years of planning, in mid-August council signed a non-binding heads of agreement with Malaysian Resources Corporation Berhad (MRCB) for a 120-day feasibility study into an incineration plant to be situated at BWEZ.
Were it to go ahead, the incinerator would require up to 400,000 tonnes of waste per year, a 1200 per cent increase on current waste levels. It would also produce ash output, which would need to be disposed of. Increasingly ash is regarded as a toxic output, containing molten heavy metals that need to be removed using power-hungry eddy current separators.
So is an incinerator the best solution for a city of 100,000 to 140,000 people?
Dr Muxina Konarova is a research fellow at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, University of Queensland. In a recent article focussing on the plastic recycling crisis for The Conversation, she made comparisons between incineration and other waste-to-energy solutions.
“Australia has invested a serious amount of funding into research, particularly in waste conversion,” wrote Dr Kunarova.
“The current recycling crisis offers an opportunity to explore some innovative ways of turning our waste into valuable products.”
In her consideration, the processes of gasification and pyrolysis offer some benefits over incineration, at least in terms of processing plastics.
“Gasification and pyrolysis are completely different processes to simply incinerating the plastic,” writes Dr Kunarova.
“The main goal of incineration is simply to destroy the waste, thus keeping it out of landfill. The heat released from incineration might be used to produce steam to drive a turbine and generate electricity, but this is only a by-product.
“Gasification and pyrolysis can produce electricity or fuels, and provide more flexible ways of storing energy than incineration. They also have much lower emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides than incineration.”
There’s a long way to go before we solve what the best waste-to-energy outcome will be for Ballarat.
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