[GreenYes] Frightened by incineration?

[Jay Donnaway <jdonnawa@dca.state.ga.us>]

Incineration of low grade wastepaper and paper mill sludges is also GHG
neutral, and more efficient than running the same material through the
intermediate step of anaerobic digestion.  Compressed pellets of waste paper
have a heat value of @ 8500 btu/lb, and burn more cleanly than coal.  This
densified biomass can be co-fired with coal at up to 30% concentrations
without affecting boiler performance.  Co-firing paper-derived fuel in
existing coal-fired boilers reduces sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide
emissions by up to 20 and 60 percent, respectively.  As paper is more
volatile than coal, combustion efficiency also increases.  Dioxin and furan
emissions are significantly reduced during co-firing due to the presence of
sulphur from the coal, and limestone injection increases the retention of
chorine and sulfur in the fly ash.

I'm not blessing the burning recyclable paper. Consider that up to 15% of
the fiber that enters a recycling mill typically winds up as sludge, and
that material is often landfilled (in industrial monofills that don't
measure up to  EPA Subtitle D MSW landfill regs).  Additionally, recycling
facilities that accept mixed residential waste paper wind up landfilling
large amounts of low grade fiber, especially during down market periods such
as we are currently experiencing.  The sustainability community should come
out in favor of the recovery of energy from this wastestream.  

Jay Donnaway

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Muna Lakhani [SMTP:muna@iafrica.com]
> Sent:	Tuesday, January 22, 2002 3:40 PM
> To:	Reindl, John
> Cc:	greenyes@grrn.org
> Subject:	Re: [GreenYes] Solid waste news from Scandinavia
> 
> Reindl, John wrote:
> > Sweden has an active waste to energy recovery program
> > which is expanding.
> 
> >  Instead, the group notes that over half the material
> > can be recycled and believes that incineration with energy recovery has
> less
> > of an environmental impact than landfills. A report several years ago
> for
> > the Norwegian EPA found that the major environmental impact of landfills
> was
> > the release of methane gas and the subsequent global climate change. 
> 
> Both of the above are frightening - all our research shows that
> incineration is worse than landfill by far, given that dioxins and
> furans are produced, and accumulate in living organisms, with dioxins
> the size of a pea being able to "give" cancer to over 100 000 people...
> 
> the heat (CO2) from incineration is also problematic, and we should not
> forget that methane as produced from biomass, is GHG neutral, so the
> incinerator is far worse for climate change..
> 
> also: if you look at the energy balance, the energy one would get would
> be far, far less than either the energy used in making that waste, or
> the energy we would save by recycling...
> 
> what do others think about incineration?
> 
> best wishes
> Muna
> 
> 
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