Another innovative county is working on a plan to vaporize its garbage at temperatures anywhere from 600 to 1,500 degrees — hotter than the sun — in order to not only generate electricity, but also to help build roads and reduce its landfill.

From Trash to Cash

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.

— R. Buckminster Fuller, visionary, author and inventor of the geodesic dome

hat if there was no such thing as “garbage,” per se — what if it’s actually true that nothing ever reduces down to being worthless trash, that everything in our universe has a function? And that all it takes to discover each supposed waste matter’s function is the willingness to see beyond our limited scope?

That radical concept is the impetus behind the Zero Waste movement. Recycling, goes the 21st-century thinking, is only effective to a certain point. As long as we’re still making virgin natural resources into products and the packaging to contain these products, we’ll never get off the landfill habit. And we need to come up with something else soon — an alternative to “managing waste” by burying it, burning it or taking it out to sea and dumping it. We’re killing our oceans with our trash, and landfills are no longer a viable solution, either.

Trash burial is the oldest form of waste treatment. The decomposition that takes place when trash is dumped into landfills produces methane, which is the culprit responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO₂ greenhouse gases combined. In fact, currently, methane emissions are causing almost half of the planet’s human-induced warming effects. And landfills are contributing to global warming through the creation of carbon dioxide as well, by the process of incinerating trash and by transporting it from the various widespread waste-management stations to the actual landfill.

According to the 2005 issue of the San Francisco Sierra Club’s newsletter, the Yodeler, Zero Waste “requires eliminating subsidies for raw-material extraction and waste disposal and holding producers responsible for their products and packaging ‘from cradle to cradle.’ The goal is to promote clean production, prevent pollution and create communities in which all products are designed to be cycled safely back into the economy or environment.” Although we would all still need to pay attention to our buying habits and our disposal practices, the impetus for resource recovery and creating a more materials-efficient economy would be put squarely back into the hands of the American companies who design and manufacture the products that, when used up, line our landfills.

This idea of Zero Waste has really taken off in a lot of European countries, but so far the United States hasn’t for the most part actively taken the challenge. High-density areas like California and some of the states along the eastern seaboard are notable exceptions, along with Boulder, Colorado, and its surrounding county.

Because the situation is dire and only becoming more so, it’s imperative that we all wean ourselves off the landfill habit. Another option is harvesting methane gas from existing trash. Since the late 1970s, hundreds of landfills across the country and around the globe, most notably in Japan, have successfully discovered ways of trapping their methane gas for constructive uses.

Yolo County, home of the University of California, Davis, has recently committed to undertake an innovative renewable-energy technique that could someday provide up to 5 percent of the country’s total energy needs. This is not a pipe dream: right now, by converting its methane gas, the 9½-acre landfill generates enough electricity to power 3,000 homes indefinitely.

“It is hard to visualize,” Yolo County Central Landfill’s Senior Civil Engineer Ramin Yazdani told writer Eric J. Balizantz in the article “Local landfill produces energy from garbage” (California Aggie, February 2007), “but there is a whole universe operating in there.” He gestured to the mountain of trash he stood on top of at his facility.

At a typical landfill, where waste compaction is critical to extending the life of the facility, the trash is tamped down on a daily basis and then covered over with soil. Sometimes, alternative materials are used as a covering — several sprayed-on foam products, for instance, and temporary blankets. Chipped wood and chemically “fixed” biosolids (dewatered, treated sewage sludge) may also be used. This space occupied by the compacted waste and its cover is called “daily cell.”

At the Yolo County Central Landfill, the cell is as closely hovered over, according to Balizantz, as a hospital patient. White PVC tubes and steel black pipes zigzagging in and out of the mountain of trash are monitored by computer to track the mound’s temperature, moisture and pH levels.

“The goal is to make as hospitable an environment as possible for the microorganisms,” Yazdani explained. “They are devouring the waste and converting it to usable methane gas.”

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, there are approximately 395 operational landfill projects in the United States today where gas is being converted to energy projects. “This generates around 9 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year,” Yazdani added.

Which proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that energy can come from other sources than fossil fuels. And when the source is trash, we seem to have an inexhaustible amount of it. By most estimates, it will take somewhere between seven and 10 years to fully exhaust a cell of its energy supply. Engineers are working on a plan that, by injecting the cells with oxygen once the methane has been depleted, will reduce the landfill’s size by 25 to 35 percent.

Another innovative county, this one in Florida, is working on a plan to vaporize its garbage at temperatures anywhere from 600 to 1,500 degrees — hotter than some parts of the sun — in order to not only generate electricity, but also to help build roads and reduce its landfill to but a memory. St. Lucie County’s projected $425 million facility will use plasma arcs, described as being similar to lightning; when completed, this will be the largest of its kind in the world. Officials expect to vaporize 3,000 tons of garbage a day; they estimate that the entire landfill, 30 years’ worth of waste amounting to 4.3 million tons, will be gone in 18 years.

And they’re using everything — every by-product — as they go along, according to Geoplasma, the Atlanta-based company building and paying for the plant. Combustible gas will run the turbines to create about 120 megawatts of electricity a day, most of which will then be sold back to the grid. In addition, the facility will operate on about a third of the power it generates. About 80,000 pounds of steam per day will be sold to the neighboring Tropicana production site to power the juice plant’s turbines. And sludge from the county’s wastewater treatment plant will be vaporized, with up to 600 tons a day of the melted organic matter being hardened into slag and sold for road and construction projects.

“There are so many benefits to actually doing this,” Warrenton Mayor George Fitch told the Culpepper Star Exponent’s staff writer, Allison Brophy Chamion, in the article “From trash to electricity” (January 17, 2008, issue). Mentioning that the technology is proven and in place in several European countries, Fitch added, “So we are on the cusp.”

Right here in New Mexico, Albuquerque’s Mayor Martin Chavez, who will officially ever after be known as our state’s first Zero Waste mayor, announced on June 15 of last year his new plan to stop adding to that city’s landfills by 2030 through a gradual increase in recycling and the development of energy production from garbage. Albuquerque, which produces 600,000 tons of waste annually, will over this coming year and 2009 develop a commercial recycling program and expand its automated curbside program, with a new compost facility fully in place by next year. Once the system for producing electricity from the landfills’ methane gas is up and running, it will use the rest of the city’s accumulated waste so that just 22 years from now, Albuquerque will no longer be adding to its landfills.

So, OK, the obvious next question is, What about us here in Santa Fe? What are we doing to eventually dump our dump? Between the city and the county of Santa Fe, we’ve got seven transfer stations. All empty their trash collections out into the Caja del Rio landfill off N.M. 599, run by the Santa Fe Solid Waste Management Agency and governed by three city councilors and three county commissioners. The landfill’s executive manager, Randall Kippenbrock, said in a recent phone interview that his facility is currently working together with an engineering company to install a methane-extraction system.

This is a long-term commitment — 30 months — during which they’ll study all the options to determine the most viable use for the gas they collect. “It all depends on the quantity and the quality of the methane,” he explained. Two other New Mexico landfills, in Rio Rancho and Sunland, south of Las Cruces, are already actively collecting gas. “We’ll be the third one if this goes through,” Kippenbrock said. If in fact the go-ahead is given to convert our trash to energy, it will most likely be done in a micro-turbine station.

But here in New Mexico, cautioned both Bill DeGrande, city Solid Waste Management Division director, and E. Gifford Stack of the New Mexico Environmental Department during recent phone interviews, our arid climate means we don’t get a lot of water, so our landfills don’t generate large amounts of methane like in other, wetter places. We also don’t get the volumes of trash that a city like Albuquerque gets. So is there a method of energy harvesting tailored specifically for us here in Santa Fe?

Our best bet could be a system similar to Yolo County’s, in which all efforts are made to create and monitor landfill conditions for as hospitable an environment as possible for the microorganisms. After all, they’re doing the brunt of the work — devouring waste and converting it to methane, a valued commodity once it’s converted to electric power.

Called archaea, these industrious microbes, similar to bacteria, thrive in oxygen-free environments. “The impact of these microbially controlled cycles on future climate warming is potentially huge,” Dr. Reay of the University of Edinburgh told the online journal ScienceDaily in the article “Microbes as Climate Engineers” (January 30, 2008). By better understanding these processes, he continued, we could take more carbon out of the atmosphere using microbes on land and in the sea. Methane-eating bacteria can be used to catch and contain that potentially harmful gas released from landfills.

The Spanish word caja means box. Whatever system we choose, it’s time for us in Santa Fe to bust our way out of the box of inertia we’re in. All over this world, people are finding ways to put their trash to work, helping to eliminate the causes of global warming. We need to take up the gauntlet by adapting an alternative as soon as possible for the Caja del Rio landfill, one that makes use of our so-called waste in the most respectful way possible for our gorgeous and sacred desert sky and landscape.




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	Another innovative county is working on a plan to vaporize its garbage at temperatures anywhere from 600 to 1,500 degrees — hotter than the sun — in order to not only generate electricity, but also to help build roads and reduce its landfill. From Trash to Cash Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value. — R. Buckminster Fuller, visionary, author and inventor of the geodesic dome hat if there was no such thing as “garbage,” per se — what if it’s actually true that nothing ever reduces down to being worthless trash, that everything in our universe has a function? And that all it takes to discover each supposed waste matter’s function is the willingness to see beyond our limited scope? That radical concept is the impetus behind the Zero Waste movement. Recycling, goes the 21st-century thinking, is only effective to a certain point. As long as we’re still making virgin natural resources into products and the packaging to contain these products, we’ll never get off the landfill habit. And we need to come up with something else soon — an alternative to “managing waste” by burying it, burning it or taking it out to sea and dumping it. We’re killing our oceans with our trash, and landfills are no longer a viable solution, either. Trash burial is the oldest form of waste treatment. The decomposition that takes place when trash is dumped into landfills produces methane, which is the culprit responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO₂ greenhouse gases combined. In fact, currently, methane emissions are causing almost half of the planet’s human-induced warming effects. And landfills are contributing to global warming through the creation of carbon dioxide as well, by the process of incinerating trash and by transporting it from the various widespread waste-management stations to the actual landfill. According to the 2005 issue of the San Francisco Sierra Club’s newsletter, the Yodeler, Zero Waste “requires eliminating subsidies for raw-material extraction and waste disposal and holding producers responsible for their products and packaging ‘from cradle to cradle.’ The goal is to promote clean production, prevent pollution and create communities in which all products are designed to be cycled safely back into the economy or environment.” Although we would all still need to pay attention to our buying habits and our disposal practices, the impetus for resource recovery and creating a more materials-efficient economy would be put squarely back into the hands of the American companies who design and manufacture the products that, when used up, line our landfills. This idea of Zero Waste has really taken off in a lot of European countries, but so far the United States hasn’t for the most part actively taken the challenge. High-density areas like California and some of the states along the eastern seaboard are notable exceptions, along with Boulder, Colorado, and its surrounding county. Because the situation is dire and only becoming more so, it’s imperative that we all wean ourselves off the landfill habit. Another option is harvesting methane gas from existing trash. Since the late 1970s, hundreds of landfills across the country and around the globe, most notably in Japan, have successfully discovered ways of trapping their methane gas for constructive uses. Yolo County, home of the University of California, Davis, has recently committed to undertake an innovative renewable-energy technique that could someday provide up to 5 percent of the country’s total energy needs. This is not a pipe dream: right now, by converting its methane gas, the 9½-acre landfill generates enough electricity to power 3,000 homes indefinitely. “It is hard to visualize,” Yolo County Central Landfill’s Senior Civil Engineer Ramin Yazdani told writer Eric J. Balizantz in the article “Local landfill produces energy from garbage” (California Aggie, February 2007), “but there is a whole universe operating in there.” He gestured to the mountain of trash he stood on top of at his facility. At a typical landfill, where waste compaction is critical to extending the life of the facility, the trash is tamped down on a daily basis and then covered over with soil. Sometimes, alternative materials are used as a covering — several sprayed-on foam products, for instance, and temporary blankets. Chipped wood and chemically “fixed” biosolids (dewatered, treated sewage sludge) may also be used. This space occupied by the compacted waste and its cover is called “daily cell.” At the Yolo County Central Landfill, the cell is as closely hovered over, according to Balizantz, as a hospital patient. White PVC tubes and steel black pipes zigzagging in and out of the mountain of trash are monitored by computer to track the mound’s temperature, moisture and pH levels. “The goal is to make as hospitable an environment as possible for the microorganisms,” Yazdani explained. “They are devouring the waste and converting it to usable methane gas.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency, there are approximately 395 operational landfill projects in the United States today where gas is being converted to energy projects. “This generates around 9 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year,” Yazdani added. Which proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that energy can come from other sources than fossil fuels. And when the source is trash, we seem to have an inexhaustible amount of it. By most estimates, it will take somewhere between seven and 10 years to fully exhaust a cell of its energy supply. Engineers are working on a plan that, by injecting the cells with oxygen once the methane has been depleted, will reduce the landfill’s size by 25 to 35 percent. Another innovative county, this one in Florida, is working on a plan to vaporize its garbage at temperatures anywhere from 600 to 1,500 degrees — hotter than some parts of the sun — in order to not only generate electricity, but also to help build roads and reduce its landfill to but a memory. St. Lucie County’s projected $425 million facility will use plasma arcs, described as being similar to lightning; when completed, this will be the largest of its kind in the world. Officials expect to vaporize 3,000 tons of garbage a day; they estimate that the entire landfill, 30 years’ worth of waste amounting to 4.3 million tons, will be gone in 18 years. And they’re using everything — every by-product — as they go along, according to Geoplasma, the Atlanta-based company building and paying for the plant. Combustible gas will run the turbines to create about 120 megawatts of electricity a day, most of which will then be sold back to the grid. In addition, the facility will operate on about a third of the power it generates. About 80,000 pounds of steam per day will be sold to the neighboring Tropicana production site to power the juice plant’s turbines. And sludge from the county’s wastewater treatment plant will be vaporized, with up to 600 tons a day of the melted organic matter being hardened into slag and sold for road and construction projects. “There are so many benefits to actually doing this,” Warrenton Mayor George Fitch told the Culpepper Star Exponent’s staff writer, Allison Brophy Chamion, in the article “From trash to electricity” (January 17, 2008, issue). Mentioning that the technology is proven and in place in several European countries, Fitch added, “So we are on the cusp.” Right here in New Mexico, Albuquerque’s Mayor Martin Chavez, who will officially ever after be known as our state’s first Zero Waste mayor, announced on June 15 of last year his new plan to stop adding to that city’s landfills by 2030 through a gradual increase in recycling and the development of energy production from garbage. Albuquerque, which produces 600,000 tons of waste annually, will over this coming year and 2009 develop a commercial recycling program and expand its automated curbside program, with a new compost facility fully in place by next year. Once the system for producing electricity from the landfills’ methane gas is up and running, it will use the rest of the city’s accumulated waste so that just 22 years from now, Albuquerque will no longer be adding to its landfills. So, OK, the obvious next question is, What about us here in Santa Fe? What are we doing to eventually dump our dump? Between the city and the county of Santa Fe, we’ve got seven transfer stations. All empty their trash collections out into the Caja del Rio landfill off N.M. 599, run by the Santa Fe Solid Waste Management Agency and governed by three city councilors and three county commissioners. The landfill’s executive manager, Randall Kippenbrock, said in a recent phone interview that his facility is currently working together with an engineering company to install a methane-extraction system. This is a long-term commitment — 30 months — during which they’ll study all the options to determine the most viable use for the gas they collect. “It all depends on the quantity and the quality of the methane,” he explained. Two other New Mexico landfills, in Rio Rancho and Sunland, south of Las Cruces, are already actively collecting gas. “We’ll be the third one if this goes through,” Kippenbrock said. If in fact the go-ahead is given to convert our trash to energy, it will most likely be done in a micro-turbine station. But here in New Mexico, cautioned both Bill DeGrande, city Solid Waste Management Division director, and E. Gifford Stack of the New Mexico Environmental Department during recent phone interviews, our arid climate means we don’t get a lot of water, so our landfills don’t generate large amounts of methane like in other, wetter places. We also don’t get the volumes of trash that a city like Albuquerque gets. So is there a method of energy harvesting tailored specifically for us here in Santa Fe? Our best bet could be a system similar to Yolo County’s, in which all efforts are made to create and monitor landfill conditions for as hospitable an environment as possible for the microorganisms. After all, they’re doing the brunt of the work — devouring waste and converting it to methane, a valued commodity once it’s converted to electric power. Called archaea, these industrious microbes, similar to bacteria, thrive in oxygen-free environments. “The impact of these microbially controlled cycles on future climate warming is potentially huge,” Dr. Reay of the University of Edinburgh told the online journal ScienceDaily in the article “Microbes as Climate Engineers” (January 30, 2008). By better understanding these processes, he continued, we could take more carbon out of the atmosphere using microbes on land and in the sea. Methane-eating bacteria can be used to catch and contain that potentially harmful gas released from landfills. The Spanish word caja means box. Whatever system we choose, it’s time for us in Santa Fe to bust our way out of the box of inertia we’re in. All over this world, people are finding ways to put their trash to work, helping to eliminate the causes of global warming. We need to take up the gauntlet by adapting an alternative as soon as possible for the Caja del Rio landfill, one that makes use of our so-called waste in the most respectful way possible for our gorgeous and sacred desert sky and landscape.