Wrong Answer

A few days back I was driving around running an errand and happened to catch on the radio “MarketPlace”, that annoyingly smug business program carried on NPR stations. I try not to listen to NPR any more, but it’s one of those things that’s hard to stop once you’ve started, like cigarettes or heroin. Anyway, they carried a story about energy independence blah blah blah, and how someone was trying to commercialize plasma gasification as a waste to energy technology. Plasma gasification uses high temperatures to convert organic materials into “syngas”, or a gas stream composed mostly of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. These two substances then can be catalytically rearranged to form methane, hydrogen, and hydrocarbon fuels. It's been tried as a means of biomass conversion in a few places.

There was a hint of conspiracy theory about why this technology just isn’t all over the place, making truckloads of money for its proponents.

You know, we would be taking away a large business for the landfill people and the incinerators, so waste company do not want to see this technology come out. On the other hand, if we produce power, we will be infringing on the coal business and fossil fuel burning business.

I guess the energy consumption and expense involved have little to do with it. The other point that was brought up in the article as a reason we “need” this technology is that we’re running out of landfill space. . . .

The “running out of landfill space” argument is always a sign that you’re talking to someone who doesn’t really know much about environmental issues. We’re not running out of landfill space these days, so much as we’re running out of political will to site landfills where they are needed. Landfills also are a sign of mismanaged resources. For example, a significant chunk of the copper from the entire lithosphere is in landfills, a fact coupled with rising demand in China, which helps explain why thieves are starting to strip copper fittings out of abandoned forclosed homes. This article points to more examples of metals whose stocks may be approaching exhaustion. I found it from a Daily Kos diary “Peak Metal”, which has a nice analysis of the problem, but then mars it by indulging in liberal handwringing about how hard metals reclamation will be, and engaging in NIMBY-ism about how you don’t want a landfill mine as a neighbor (knee-jerk NIMBY thinking being another sign you’re talking to someone who doesn’t really know much about environmental issues).

So, we don’t need to be melting garbage to make fuel or electricity – we have other ways of getting those things. However, we are probably past the point where we need to start reclaiming and reusing the crap we’ve been tossing away so blithely. Noone yet is talking seriously yet about landfill mining, but if we’re arresting people for stealing copper, digging up landfills for it can be only a matter of time.