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.'"

Comments

First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

If only forum spam could be processed into electricity.

Bloody socialists

[pr0nbot]

Bloody socialists. My garbage is mine to dispose of as I see fit -- after, all I created it through my own private endeavour! To see it wrested from my hands is frankly an assault on my liberty and a chilling curb on garbage creators like me everywhere. By golly, if they take too much of my garbage, I'll be forced to move overseas.

Re:Bloody socialists

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to capitalists, who only license you the garbage ...

Re:Bloody socialists

[JaredOfEuropa]

Don't worry, this only applies to Eurotrash.

Re:Bloody socialists

[captainpanic]

All you have to do to understand the true capitalist way you can deal with garbage is go to Napoli in Southern Italy, where the mafia own the garbage business.

Re:Bloody socialists

[jalopezp]

Garbage collection in Naples is handled by the municipality afak. Remember that trash issue a few years ago? If the mafia had been in charge of trash, all the trash would have disappeared. No one makes things disappear like the mafia.

Re:Bloody socialists

[interkin3tic]

Yes, but where will it stop? After they've taken control of Europe's natural trash resources, they'll turn to Russia, then it will only be a matter of time before they attack us on our own jersey shores.

Re:Bloody socialists

[ColdWetDog]

So criminal organizations should are good and should be nurtured?

Well that's why we have elections, isn't it?

Haven't read TFA

[ledow]

But, how much energy does it take to move that amount of waste, from those countries, to Sweden, sort, process, and extract energy from them compared to, say, the useful energy out from the process that's heating those 250,000 homes (which doesn't seem an awful lot, and I live in the UK which is smaller but has more people in it)?

Surely the transport costs alone would mean it would be better to buy the diesel used to transport that amount of material, then burn that directly?

How is this "green"?

Re:Haven't read TFA

[vlm]

But, how much energy does it take to move that amount of ...

It can't be worse than coal because it doesn't take any energy to break it loose from the earth and crush it, and the labor at the small scale is "free" you don't have to pay people to put trash in a trash can (but at higher levels a truck of coal costs about as much to drive as a truck of garbage) Admittedly the energy content per Kg is probably a bit lower so its not going to be as much of a win over coal as you'd guess. But it certainly won't be worse.

The real killer energy cost / green issue is exhaust emissions scrubbing. Not selling electronic devices with lead based solder doesn't mean all durable goods made with lead solder instantly disappeared. Plenty of things in the trash that you wouldn't want to breathe after burning. You'd like to think special bins for plastic and electronics magically means the "food refuse" bin is pristine pure 100% lead and plastic and paint free, but its not, and the required scrubbing just in case is expensive.

Re:Haven't read TFA

[Sqr(twg)]

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.)

Re:Haven't read TFA

[Sqr(twg)]

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.

Re:Haven't read TFA

[FishTankX]

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.

Re:Haven't read TFA

[gadget junkie]

[...] So, in country like Italy disposing of garbage is a costly problem and it is not unlikely that the government would be happy to pay.

About the cost of moving oil, well if you import your oil from Saudi, then it is cheaper to import rubbish from Italy. If oil comes from Norway via pipes probably not, but oil i definetely more expansive than garbage

I beg to disagree. Garbage producing countries are paying to get rid of the thing, including transport costs. I do not see the Saudis paying the swedes to get rid of the oil which is staining the inside of the oil wells. In the end the Swedes are only selling a service: how to part morons from their money. Luckily, now there's an economic crisis, so we're starting incinerating plants over here in italy too.
Pity is, they're owned and/or controlled by the municipalities, so none of those will use garbage from outside their administrative area: plants are built too small, etc.etc., so as a country the problem will remain.

The enviromental Sweden

[the_arrow]

Swedes are very good at recycling and waste separation. Even McDonald et al. have different trash bins for everything.

Re:Great solution!

[swillden]

Population is a non-problem. Growth is already basically zero (and often negative) in the developed world, and leveling off in the developing world. We've already reached "peak child", to use Hans Rosling's terminology. Due to the trajectory already in place we will reach ~10B population by around 2050, but that's it. We need to figure out how to handle that many people, but no more, and in fact beyond 2050 there's every reason to expect that the population will begin to decline, barring significant improvements in longevity.

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html

An excellent book I'd recommend to anyone who is scared of the future is "Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think". This Swedish garbage burning is an example of the healthy trajectory the world is on... no, it's not a perfect solution, but it's a significant improvement, both in greenhouse gases and in waste management, and it will be followed by other significant improvements. We're following an exponential curve of improvements in efficiency and cleanliness while the population growth is leveling off.