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Oslo Needs Your Garbage
lister king of smeg writes in with news that Oslo is running out of garbage which it burns to generate heat and electricity. "Oslo, a recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn. The problem is not unique to Oslo, a city of 1.4 million people. Across Northern Europe, where the practice of burning garbage to generate heat and electricity has exploded in recent decades, demand for trash far outstrips supply." Back in October we told you about a similar garbage shortage facing Sweden.
just get more americans to settle there... best waste producers in the world !
I never ran out in the game. Reality is failing to accurately model.
The point isn't that Oslo doesn't produce enough garbage, it's that it uses more electricity than burning garbage can produce and because of high energy costs it's somehow cheaper to import garbage from Romania and Bulgaria than domestic generation costs.
Of course, other areas of Europe are producing abundant amounts of garbage, including southern Italy, where cities like Naples paid towns in Germany and the Netherlands to accept garbage, helping to defuse a Neapolitan garbage crisis. Yet though Oslo considered the Italian garbage, it preferred to stick with what it said was the cleaner and safer English waste. “It’s a sensitive question,” Mr. Mikkelsen said.
In a hierarchy of environmental goals, Mr. Haltbrekken said, producing less garbage should take first place, while generating energy from garbage should be at the bottom. “The problem is that our lowest priority conflicts with our highest one,” he said.
“So now we import waste from Leeds and other places, and we also had discussions with Naples,” he added. “We said, ‘O.K., so we’re helping the Neapolitans,’ but that’s not a long-term strategy.”
“In the short-term view, of course, it’s better to burn the garbage in Oslo than to leave it in Leeds or Bristol.”
But “in the long term,” he said, “no.”
This started decades ago already.
First step was to keep compostables out of the trash (kitchen and garden wastes). Direct result: the rest of the trash, including lots of plastic and some paper, burned much hotter than it used to with all the wet stuff inside. And that caused problems for the ovens that were built for a different kind of fuel mix.
Over the recent years more and more plastics are being taken out from the trash. First the PET bottles, nowadays in large parts of Europe all kinds of plastic packing material has to be kept separate.
Most of the stuff that burns well (paper, plastics, organic wastes) is being recycled now, and kept out of the incinerators. What remains: not much, really. Some glass, stone, metals. Not much that burns well. Some wood will burn, some plastic that's attached to something else or otherwise ended up in the wrong bin. Baby diapers will burn quite well, too, as that's mostly paper and plastics. Rags that are so worn they're not offered to some charity.
Now indeed the volume of trash is decreasing (anything that's taken out to recycle is not trash), and the trash that's there won't burn as well as it used to. So no surprise really that it's causing problems for the operators of waste incinerators.
Dear Europe,
The United States has so much trash, we're dumping it into the ocean. For a small additional fee, we'll ship you all the waste of the eastern seaboard. Note to slashdot mods: I'm not joking. We really do dump it into the ocean.
Buy American. Buy trash.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Reminds me of a Futurama episode.
Fry had to teach the New York of 3000 how to litter like the New York of 2000.
Where I live (Edmonton, Canada), recycling plastic, paper and glass has been around for years. Household waste thrown into the garbage along with everything else is composted. The city is nearing 1.1 million people (growing by about 5000 per month), and the composting facility separates out metals and wood, then within 30 days everything else goes from garbage to dirt. Heat is recycled, methane is de-watered, compressed, and burned in vehicles. You can't burn garbage here. I'm surprised they are allowed to burn garbage there.
Don't they know Garbage always gets expensive in the mid game? Haven't they played Powergrid?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Doc
Table-ized A.I.
The world's energy demands can be met -- not by harnessing the power of the atom, but by harnessing the garbage of New Jersey.
When 3D printing finally gets past its 15 minutes, we can ship them all our misshapen plastic trinkets. Should keep them going for decades.
Surely a few more Ikea stores would solve the problem:-)
Just wait a couple decades, then you won't need heaters at all.
So will other countries be paying Norway to deal with their garbage, or will Norway be paying other countries for supplying them with fuel?
I believe there is a large ball of garbage orbiting the sun and due back circa 3000.
Grab your Smelloscope and you should be able to find it on it outbound trajectory
We have nigh uncountable garbage mines in this country. Why should we not support our overseas friends power needs by opening them as concessions.
Which would lead to the natural conclusions: The EPA will regulate garbage mining, the Sierra Club will start decrying the spoilation of our resources, the paranoid will start advocate government control to assure our future garbage needs....
I thought that place ran on geo-thermal.... oh well, another green illusion shattered.
an episode of Futurama...
Much more packaging could be made of biofuel.
I can't imagine this is only a problem in certain Scandinavian cities. Garabge incarceration that drives generators has been the standard way of processing non-recyclable refuse for decades in most of Europe.
Last time I counted, we were 623,966 residents here. Give or take a dozen. Did the city need garbage so badly they started to burn the population now?
Burning waste for heating would not be so bad had the waste been sorted first. Sadly that is not the case and everything is burnt no matter how toxic. The whole garbage collection system in Sweden at least is centered around recycling, not burning. The waste from the process is released in full into the air or buried into the ground as ashes. Burning do not destroy all the toxic things in the waste so a lot of things is realeased into the air that is worse than burning coal or oil.
I hate it but sadly the green idiots seem to think it is a great idea releasing the stuff into the air instead of recycling it.
and pardon the pun, by europes landfill bans. to think that somehow burning your trash is a more acceptable alternative is actually quite absurd. the arguments against it are compelling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incinerator
Good people go to bed earlier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller:_Bullshit!#Environmental_skepticism
Environmental skepticism
Penn & Teller describe themselves as environmental skeptics. They have made several television appearances attempting to discredit environmental concerns. The "Environmental Hysteria" episode attempted to "prove the global warming crisis, among other things, was created by the out of control imagination of hysterical hippies and environmentalists".
When subsequently challenged at the James Randi Educational Foundation's The Amazing Meeting 6 about their views on global warming, Penn Jillette published a piece in the Los Angeles Times saying "I don't know about climate change".[16]
Also:
Penn acknowledged his and Teller's biases, saying, "We're fair and we never take people out of context. We're biased, but we try to be honest."
I.e. Biased and with an agenda.
Seek information on recycling and environment elsewhere.
All Penn and Teller provide on that topic is one-sided, "mean-spirited, sanctimonious and self-righteous" bullshit.
Also bigoted, as Jillette's idea of being "fair when one is being mean-spirited, sanctimonious and self-righteous" is saying "Hey! What do I know? Sure. I'm being an asshole and I'm spouting nonsense from my position of authority (just look at all the other crazy shit I very loudly rant about on TV - all the shit I rant about MUST BE crazy) - but it's not like I reeeaaaly know anything.
Cause, in essence - you simply can't know some things. They are beyond our comprehension..."
They are bigoted assholes, just like the creationists bible-thumpers . It's just that they are YOUR KIND of assholes.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
We do already import large amounts of garbage from Romania though. It's called gypsies.
Nothing like a little racism....
We'll send you a container with our best politicians.
They should burn well, as they are all full of shit.
Why does no one cry "bigot!" when someone slanders an entire nation? It's pure hatred, as evil as hating Jews or Muslims or Asians or blacks.
Oh, but it's ok to hate those people, because I don't like some of the things their government has done.
Hypocrisy at its finest.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Maybe they can stop trucking there waste to Michigan
Get up!
Palm beach county, Florida is installing a system that turns trash into a plasma and apparently consumes it completely. The energy produced is to be used on the grid. Since the local method of garbage disposal is building garbage mountains it is a welcome technology. The highest mountain in Florida is the Ft. Lauderdale garbage dump. Frankly i would like to give our wretched governor Rick Scott a home on top of that garbage mountain. Miami was even worse as the city used to throw away the corpses of the poor on their dump. You can't imagine how ugly the tops of those garbage mountains are. It is like hell on earth and the buzzards and sea gulls eat away at the trash up there and broadcast their waste all over Florida as well as the ocean. I used to have to dump loads of logs up there and it was so bad that at times i threw up. You just have to see trucks dumping all kinds of chicken guts and the like in the hot sun here and smell the horror to understand i suppose. With a bit of luck you might stick your foot in the belly of a dead body up there.
The Satanists think the stink helps their prayers and they actually are forced to have security guards on the mountain all night, every night. After all we wouldn't want a warlock hurting himself and suing the county.
First, burning garbage is not the epitome of clean green energy. While it might be greener than coal or even natural gas its a trite solution implemented as a cheap alternative instead of finding a real clean source of energy. Also burning garbage is not a global solution to power, its only about alleviating the municipal headache of maintaining and finding new landfills.
Second, places like this are probably so consumed by an incessant need to recycle and compost that they have depleted their own source of "garbage" energy.
This is another reason why green society is just inherently Stupid (with a capital S), because its always about myopic applications of solutions without looking at the bigger picture. You can't remove all recyclables from municipal waste and then try to also power your city off of garbage, its one or the other.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Right now, most of us see garbage as a problem and landfills as an environmental crisis.
In the future our descendants might see landfills as a resource. Vast amounts of reusable materials are stored in landfills for future reuse.
In a post scarcity future, 100 years from now, landfills may end up being some of the most valuable land, guarded and strip-mined.
After we use up all the cheap oil, and our technology has advanced. so that reuse is more practical, people may curse the "damned fools" who burned/recycled all those resources instead of storing them for the future in landfills.
They should watch Futurama "A big piece of Garbage" episode and learn from Fry how to solve their garbage problem
Run a pipeline from US Senate/House of Reps. to Oslo. Operate incinerator off the methane vapors.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
After reading the article about the girl expelled from school, I'm thinking the entire state could be sent there as Garbage.. Oh, I mean White Trash.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Seriously, we need to encourage cities like NYC to do this and pull in garbage from around the area. This is far better than throwing it away in a dump or in the ocean.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Really?
You mean Celine Dion does tours in Detroit?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
They just have to clean my house in the process of taking it.
That is all.
Just send some ocean-going barges out to the North Atlantic Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex...right up the greenies alley...
Nothing to see here but us trolls...move along...
Parent : Starving kids in Africa would love to have that kind of food to eat !
Child : But freezing kids in Norway need this in the trash to keep warm !
We could just send them the cast of Jersey Shore... that should satisfy their needs for the next 20 years or so.
There is a Texas sized Island of trash floating in the Pacific ocean. Last time I checked the Spanish hadn't claimed it yet.
This happened already in Trondheim, 20 years ago.
Their trash burning plant, which was was primarily used for heating residential houses, had to add petroleum to the mix to get the garbage to burn, after paper recycling gained popularity. I remember the chairman of the electric company railed against paper recycling for this reason.