Slashdot Mirror
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 !
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
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
That's like saying "The answer to our energy needs is in the Earth's core".
Sure. That may be true. But actually GETTING there and doing anything in that particular area is a very dangerous proposition.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
So will other countries be paying Norway to deal with their garbage, or will Norway be paying other countries for supplying them with fuel?
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....
without a whole bunch of command line parameters on startup just to make it run stable, sc4000 is garbage
an episode of Futurama...
No, that is just a conversion error between metric and imperial residents.
You are supposed to use the waste-to-energy incinerator and place it in the border so half the pollution goes to a neighboring county. Then you accept their trash in return a monthly cash payment, burn the trash to generate electricity, which you then resell to them. Profit.
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.
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
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.
No, in this case, it's not our government, but the trash-per-capita, an artifact of our consumerist society, that does hold substantial individual liability. While I don't endorse "prejudice by averages" as that leads to all sorts of fallacious beliefs that harm people.
That doesn't justify your stupid comment, because the GP didn't mention our government at all.