Make It Green

I just read an article in the paper about Waste Management Corporation here in Michigan. Rather then capturing the wastewater runoff caused by rainwater at their Maple City site and trucking it to the Frankfort for treatment they have instated new technology to take care of the problem. It uses methane gas generated by the landfill to power a system that evaporate and concentrate the liquid called leachate creating a product that will go back into the landfill to add decomposition.

This is a win win deal, keeping the trucks off the roads, saving Waste Management money, taking extra load off the treatment plant, and about half the methane gas created at the site is used. They say that even though it is better for the environment they are doing it for economic reasons only.

It’s a shame that new technologies that are good for our environment are often at the mercy of cost considerations and the not in my backyard attitude that keeps things like wind farms, trash handling systems, and other “green” systems from being implemented.

We must let our elected representatives on the local, state, and national level know that we need to clean up our act and the time to do it is now.

Trash Into Electricity

Gasification of trash.

 A local Michigan waste management company is asking to build a plant to turn trash into gas and make electricity with it. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. The process involves grinding up the trash and then turning it into a gas using the high heat of a plasma chamber. Could this mean the end to land fills in the future?

What’s next?

The following  from www.tech-fag.com  explains how it works.

Plasma Gasification

First, garbage is fed into an auger, a machine which shreds it into smaller pieces. These are then fed into a plasma chamber - a sealed, stainless steel vessel filled with either nitrogen or ordinary air. A 650-volt electrical current is passed between two electrodes; this rips electrons from the air and creates plasma.

A constant flow of electricity through the plasma maintains a field of extremely intense energy powerful enough to disintegrate the shredded garbage into its component elements. The byproducts are a glass-like substance used as raw materials for high-strength asphalt or household tiles and "syngas".

Syngas is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide and it can be converted into fuels such as hydrogen, natural gas or ethanol. Syngas (which leaves the converter at a temperature of around 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit) is fed into a cooling system which generates steam. This steam is used to drive turbines which produce electricity - part of which is used to power the converter, while the rest can be used for the plant's heating or electrical needs, or sold back to the utility grid.

Therefore, aside from the initial power supply from the community's electrical grid, the whole machine can produce the electricity it needs for operations. It also produces materials that can be sold for commercial use so, at some point, the plasma gasification system will generate profit for its users.