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.
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.
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
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."
So will other countries be paying Norway to deal with their garbage, or will Norway be paying other countries for supplying them with fuel?
an episode of Futurama...
No, that is just a conversion error between metric and imperial residents.
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