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.

Comments

Reword

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Reword

[skovnymfe]

Denmark doesn't have hydro power (no mountains) and it doesn't have nuclear (oooh, Chernobyl..!). It's primarily the burning of natural gas and coal, plus whatever the wind farms produce, that keeps the lights on.

Choice quotes

[Anonymous Coward]

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.”

We can help.

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Nothing new

[jez9999]

You're much better off reusing/recycling whatever you can

Debatable. See this Penn & Teller Bullshit! episode, and consider how much empirical evidence you've actually seen that recycling is always best for the environment or whether, in many cases, it would actually be better to landfill stuff and create new stuff from scratch, especially things like glass where we have an effectively infinite supply of sand to create new glass with.