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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.
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.
Most of the burned garbage is used to feed central heating systems. Same with a lot of other cities in Scandinavia. A few large central furnaces and a big network of hot water pipes.
Not so much to produce electricity. Most of the electricity in Scandinavia is water power or nuclear with a few coal/oil burners that are used for backup in case the current production is insufficient. Add to it a number of windmills but their contribution is small.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I'm not joking. We really do dump it into the ocean.
According to the EPA, that stopped completely by 1992.
"The main objective of the federal Ocean Dumping Ban Act of 1988 has been realized--we have stopped dumping sewage sludge into the ocean," Reilly said. "EPA will continue to enforce the consent decrees which require the establishment of long-term, land-based disposal alternatives. We will also continue to encourage solutions that have beneficial uses. Through these efforts, not only are we preventing pollution by protecting the ocean from use as a dump, we are now seeing sludge recognized more and more as a resource, not as a waste.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Denmark depends on their neighbors pumped hydro to dump excess wind generation, and draw upon when the wind isn't blowing. Nice arrangement for them, as it is essential for the success of wind or solar. Sadly, availability is limited, and Germany's choice to abandon nuclear is also stressing the grid in that region, and causing trouble for neighboring nations.
Most of the burned garbage is used to feed central heating systems. Same with a lot of other cities in Scandinavia. A few large central furnaces and a big network of hot water pipes.
Not so much to produce electricity. Most of the electricity in Scandinavia is water power or nuclear with a few coal/oil burners that are used for backup in case the current production is insufficient. Add to it a number of windmills but their contribution is small.
In Sweden (starting with Sweden, since I'm Swedish), windmills make out about 1/20 (slightly more, this far into 2013) of the total of the electricity produced that reach the public distribution network (it is also the second (after solar power) largest electric power production technology that produce electricity for local use by private buildings, and that production is not part of the official statistics). It is roughly the same amount of electricity that is produced in Sweden by waste heat from industry (most "waste" heat is reused for central heating, not electricity production, and Swedish industry is really good at reusing heat in production (e.g. compared to U.S. industry, which that, for example, use 20 times more energy to create heat per produced unit in smeltwerks and 10 times more in paper mills)). The wind turbines contribution to Swedens electricity production grew by 18% in 2012, and is still growing at an accelerated rate.
I'm not sure that I would call more then 1/20 of electricity production for a country with a small population, but with a huge heavy industry (mostly producing iron and copper or products made of steel and copper, and paper, all very power consuming processes), a small contribution.
In Denmark wind power stand for more then 1/4 of the electricity production and consumption. And most of the technology they use to produce it is several decades old, so the production will grow as they replace old technology with newer more efficient one. Most electrical energy used in Denmark is used for farming or food production (most of the bacon consumed in the world is produced in Denmark). Denmarks protectorate Iceland, mostly use thermal power, but wind power is on the rise. Its other large protectorate, Greenland, is mostly dependent on fossil fuel. But the amount of electricity consumed by the small Icelandic and Greenlandic populations is minuscule, compared to that used by main Denmark.
I'm not sure that I would call more then 1/4 of electricity production for a small country a small contribution.
Norway mostly rely on water power for their energy needs. But the last 2 years they've built new wind power plants even faster then Sweden.
Sweden, Denmark and Norway are self sufficient when it comes to energy consumption. Small amounts of electricity is imported from other European countries during consumption peaks and exported during production peaks.
Denmarks protectorate Iceland, mostly use thermal power, but wind power is on the rise. Its other large protectorate,
Iceland has NOT been a "protectorate" of Denmark for nearly 70 years. Also, wind power is NOT on the rise here. There is currently only one test wind mast (and that blew down recently, not sure if they have it back up) with no plans for further development. We do, however, have plenty of hydro and geothermal energy.
The present city border is completely arbitrary. The municipality and county of Oslo has 623,966 residents (or so), but in most directions from the city centre, it is imposssible to guess when you cross into the neighbouring county of Akershus. The figure of 1.4 million is for the Oslo metropolitan area which at least I think gives a better idea of the city's size.