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Sweden Imports European Garbage To Power the Nation
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that Sweden's program of generating energy from garbage is wildly successful, but recently its success has also generated a surprising issue: There is simply not enough trash. Sweden has recently begun to import about eight hundred thousand tons of trash from the rest of Europe per year to use in its power plants. Sweden already brings trash from Norway and hopes to get garbage from Italy, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic countries. Sweden creates energy for around 250,000 homes and powers one-fifth of the district heating system. Its incineration plants offer a look into the future where countries could potentially make money off of their trash instead of dumping. Landfilling of organic materials – a highly inefficient and environmentally degrading system (PDF) — has been forbidden in Sweden since 2005 and emissions of the greenhouse gas methane from landfills has fallen dramatically (PDF). 'I hope that we instead will get the waste from Italy or from Romania or Bulgaria or the Baltic countries because they landfill a lot in these countries,' says Catarina Ostlund, a senior advisor for the country's environmental protection agency. 'They don't have any incineration plants or recycling plants, so they need to find a solution for their waste.'"
The elecric energy that can be recovered from one tonne of waste (0.5 MWh) is approximately sufficient to transport one tonne of cargo the circumference of the Earth by rail or sea. The distances discussed here are significantly shorter than that.
(In addition, incineration generates about 2 MWh of heat per tonne, but that can only be used for applications like domestic heating, not for transport.)
I made a mistake in my calculation. The electric energy is only enough to go half the circumference of the Earth. The conclusion still holds, tough.
You would be surprised.
Trains can get about 400 ton-miles per galon of diesel.
So if it's 1600 miles to sweden by rail, that means that you're burning 4 gallons of diesel per ton of garbage transported.
4 gallons of diesel is about 32 pounds. So you're getting around 60 pounds of trash for 1 gallon of diesel.
I've seen some figures that peg municipal waste as ~4000 BTU/lb. If you're doing cogen then that's almost all used.
Diesel is probably closer to 16,000 BTU's per pound but even at those ratios, you're getting about 500 pounds diesel equivalent of energy out of 32 pounds of diesel.
That is a highly favorable ratio so no, it does not make transporting the garbage less energy efficent than burning diesel. Not by a long shot.
Also, if you believe in anthropogenic global warming, eliminating garbage by burning it keeps it from producing the much more AGW effecting methane gas.