Recycling Towards Zero Waste

jikelly · Nov 10, 2009

We were on a cruise ship recently and I was amazed at the workings of the ship. It was like a mini city with its own water and waste treatment plants, and power station. Their goal was to reduce waste as much as possible. They actually burned a lot of their trash and used it to generate extra power and recycled the waste water where it would be safe to drink.

That got me to thinking. Why can't our cities do that?

I know of a few small projects focused on capturing methane from landfills and using bio-digestion tanks to break down food waste and capture methane for other uses. Seems like you could make bio-diesel from food waste too.

Looking at my house, we are very wasteful. I mean we buy stuff in packages that took energy to make, then we throw those packages away. Seems like a lot of money is going in the trash.

Recycling newspaper and plastic can only go so far toward achieving a "zero-waste" world, recycling activist Eric Lombardi says. The next step, he says, is getting industry and government to work together to make going greener more profitable.

Lombardi has been into recycling ever since his first job — at his father's computer card company in the 1960s.

"We used to go to the local paper recycler with the old punch cards and he used to pay my dad for the old cards," he says. "I looked at that and went, 'I thought that was trash.' And my dad's like, 'Oh no, they make paper out of paper."

Lombardi, who now directs the nonprofit, Eco-Cycle, in Boulder, Colo., says the community has a comprehensive approach to creating "zero waste or what we call darn-near." That is, "to try and recover darn-near everything in your trash can because it's all made out of some basic materials: metals, plastic, glass, paper," he tells Steve Inskeep. "The next revolution," Lombardi says, is organic material to make compost for soil.

Boulder's Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials (CHaRM) opens its doors to one new material each year. The center takes in a variety of items, including porcelain sinks and toilets, home audio equipment and cooking oil. "We collect a lot of strange things at the CHaRM," Lombardi says.

The 1987 story of the Long Island barge that floated for thousands of miles because no city would accept its garbage led to the perception that there is a landfill crisis, Lombardi says.

"We never had a landfill crisis," he says. "What we have is a resource-efficiency crisis. There are resource wars going around the planet right now to get the raw materials that are being destroyed in our landfills and our incinerators."

The resources include trees in Indonesia, minerals in Africa and oil in the Middle East, he says. "It is not easy to get resources anymore."

"Getting us close to zero waste means that we need to work with industry to start designing their products and packaging for recovery rather than for the dump," Lombardi says.

In Europe, for example, automakers have been nudged by law to increase the materials that can be recycled in their cars, he says.

"Actually, big business understands this better than big government does," Lombardi says. "We're waiting for big government to get the concept here that waste is expensive — it is inefficient. So I look very much forward to the captains of industry getting together with the leaders in government and creating a system so that greener becomes more profitable."

Beyond Recycling: Getting to 'Zero Waste' : NPR

Trash collection giant Waste Management and the Linde Group petroleum engineering firm have partnered to create a plant that makes liquefied natural gas (LNG) from landfill gas, both companies announced this week.

Linde designed and operates the plant which is located close to Waste Management's Altamont Landfill near Livermore, Calif.

"The opening of the world's largest landfill-gas-to-LNG plant right here in California is a milestone and a testament to our commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Now that the technology has been proven, we look forward to seeing its adoption spread so more vehicles can run on garbage," Linda Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, said in a statement.

Contrary to what might be inferred from Adams' enthusiastic sound bite, the project is not the utopistic dream of incinerating any old trash in a DeLorean for fuel, nor has either company claimed this. What the project does show is an idea that reduces pollution in two ways. The renewable source for fuel is also a naturally occurring gas that would have otherwise released itself into the atmosphere.

Waste Management collects the gas that is produced from the naturally occurring decomposition of organic trash in its Livermore landfill. The Linde plant then purifies and processes that gas into LNG. The LNG is then used to fuel some of Waste Management's fleet for collecting trash and recycling. Those vehicles, of course, having been slightly modified so that they can run on LNG.

While the plant has only produced about 200,000 gallons since it started operating in September, it has the capacity to eventually produce 13,000 gallons a day or 4 million gallons a year. That would be enough to cover the fuel needs of 300 Waste Management vehicles used for garbage and recycling collection, and save about 30,000 tons of emissions per year, according to company statistics.

This is not the municipal collection giant's first foray into trash-to-energy tech. Waste Management has been distributing solar-powered trash compactors and investing in various projects geared at converting waste in usable energy in several different forms.

Waste Management squeezes fuel from landfills | Green Tech - CNET News

rbohm · Nov 10, 2009

you finally found something we agree on completely. i also think that we need to do far more recycling than we do now.

poneypower89 · Nov 10, 2009

This is something I can get behind almost 100%. I believe a LOT can be accomplished if companies just re-thought their entire packaging process and stores had some sort of policy on bagging.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why every time I go to a gas station and buy ONE 20oz soda and ONE candy bar they want to put it in a plastic bag. I'm like "Really? You think I need a bag to carry this to my car? Thanks for the extra trash I gotta clean out later..."

Red_LX · Nov 10, 2009

Recycling is something that sorely needs improvement in this country.

For example, in my area we can only recycle #1 and #2 plastic. What about #3,4,5,6 that I see all the time? Why can't those be recycled too?

Plus most plastic shopping bags are #2 plastic but all the bins now say "please, no bags." You have to go somewhere else to drop off plastic bags, they have bins for them at SOME grocery stores but not all. IMO that just encourages people to continue throwing them away. It's stupid.

GT40XStang9 · Nov 10, 2009

Burning trash doesn't sound very eco-friendly.

dew22 · Nov 10, 2009

jikelly said: ↑

recycled the waste water where it would be safe to drink.

you drank Poo water..........................

Kilgore Trout · Nov 10, 2009

We cannot do this because cities do not float around in oceans where sewage can be conveniently dumped while the tourists are not looking.

Seriously though pointing to a cruise ship as an example of anything that is environmentally friendly is ludicrous to me. They are the destroyers of the oceans and should be looked upon as such.

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Recycling Towards Zero Waste

jikelly Well-Known Member

rbohm Founding Member

poneypower89 Now everyone in the world will know I wanna bang t

Red_LX Doubt I could be of much help, unless you need por

GT40XStang9 Thanks to Tim, I get off pretty easy.

dew22 Banned by Troll

Kilgore Trout Fried or Broiled ?

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