Disposal of Plastic Waste and Discarded Electronics
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Don’t even try to separate anything, it’s a waste of time and will never be economic. Just do as the intelligent Swedes do. Take it all — plastic, tin cans, newspapers, cardboard, shred it, and incinerate it. Reduce landfill volume.
Mandate that individual households must place their trash into containers with lids fitted with hasps. If the trash collector encounters an open container and the paper contents are wet the collector will refuse to pick up that load.
Over 90% of plastic waste in the oceans comes from 10 rivers scattered across developing nations of East Asia, India, and Africa. A significant use of such plastic are containers for carrying potable water. Use existing skimmer technology fitted onto boats to clean up harbors, rivers, and delta regions.
If the IMF actually wants to do anything useful, how about funding the construction of water treatment facilities and pumped potable water distribution systems. Install gas-fired desalination plants where no aquifers or clean surface waters exist.
Desalination and reverse osmosis is used extensively across the Mideast, including Israel. Without reverse osmosis, the water derived from desalination is not potable, but is clean enough for irrigation. In fact, Israel sells such water to Syria.
With the prevailing westerly winds, the East Coast of the United States can provide a necessary service by installing the incinerators along the Atlantic — away from tourist beaches and out-of-sight. Good business opportunity.
Plastic waste like old TVs, electronics, and solar panels from developed nations has been sent to East Africa for decades. I guess it is recycled in a way. Kids scamper about with computer screens leaking toxic metals. The kids also burn off the plastic insulation of wires and cables to obtain the copper — breathing the smoke from burning plastic as they do so.
Pretty soon, as these nations develop, they aren’t going to be the trash can for the developed world, so we better get our incinerators cranked up. China used to accept solid wastes from the United States but are now refusing it.
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Andy Rowlands
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Interesting idea. I can see when I go to my local refuse disposal site (what we used to call ‘the tip’) that some stuff that households separate into various recycling bins appears to be mixed together for transport off the site. I say appears because that’s what it looks like, but without standing watching what’s going on for some time I cannot be certain.
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mick lennard
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The problem with incinerating plastic and wood pulp packaging is that it turns the carbon in the material into CO2 which is released into the atmosphere. Which we are told is a bad thing
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Caebon Bigfoot
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Always had a burn barrel (55 gal.) on my properties and always contributed to the air pollution on airy days since I owned my first property, circa 1966. I’m certain you did the same.
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Herb Rose
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Hi Carbon Bigfoot,
It doesn’t matter if you burn or compost all the carbon will end up as CO2. The main difference is the speed of the conversion. With burning it is rapid oxidation while composting a slow oxidation producing ketones, aldehydes, organic acids and other oxygenated hydrocarbons you are told to avoid.
Herb
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Carbon Bigfoot
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As a chemical engineer I worked in the waste incineration industry in the 60s. The company I worked for specialized in liquid and toxic gas incineration. During that time I had the pleasure of working with a Du Pont Louvier’s combustion specialist, a Hottel disciple who developed a simple open air incinerator utilizing a concrete pit with combustion air nozzles to provide complete combustion. it was very effective in solid waste incineration but in its simplicity there was no money to be made by selling it. I figured that if it was good enough for Du Pont that was good enough for the household trash that I generated. I gave some thought to installing tangential compressed air nozzles on my homemade burn barrel design, imitating the LUMMUS VORTEX BURNER that our company incorporated in our waste incinerator design that was 99% effective.
Unless you have excess air and residence time one rarely achieves complete combustion. Combustion of organics also provides H2O in addition to CO2 as a by-product.
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Herb Rose
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Hi Carbon Bigfoot,
I’ve always believed that on site disposal was preferable to centralized systems. Cesspools are preferable and less polluting than sewer systems and burning leaves and combustible trash on location is more economical and less polluting than hauling off to a treatment center. (Recycling is the costliest sand least efficient.) I once lived in a neighborhood near the township’s incinerator and because they used it beyond design capacity the whole area was covered with ash.
Herb
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EdStar
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Combustion of commercially manufactured products is more sinister than what most people believe. Du Pont & many of the other chemical giants came under fire by Paul Connett Ph.D (Industrial Chemistry) back in the 80’s & 90’s for their adverse pollution. Lots of toxic heavy metals are released into the atmosphere without being scrubbed. Lead & Mercury were major concerns to child health as children absorb these metals at a faster rate than adults during their growing years.
If recycling is not feasible perhaps we should just crush and bury waste rather than pump it into the air we breath??
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Herb Rose
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Hi Ed,
I grew up when all cars were spewing lead out their exhaust pipes and people burned their trash. It seems to me people have become a lot crazier since then, but that opinion may be the result of my generation being crazy. Sanity is a matter of conformity. The more you are like everyone else the more “normal” or sane you are.
Herb
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jerry krause
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Hi Herb,
I must compliment on you clearly stated wisdom. But clearly we needed a crazy person with a great amount of courage to challenge the accepted ideas of the very ‘intelligent’ Greek philosopher Aristotle and those sane philosophers of his day and and the sane philosophers who followed and agreed with his ideas for nearly 2000 years. Of course, we now know by observations and experimental results that several of Aristotle’s most fundamental ideas were unquestionably wrong. And, of course, we know that this crazy person with great courage was Gaileo Galilei.
Have a good day, Jerry
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