{"id":746,"date":"2008-12-05T14:49:42","date_gmt":"2008-12-05T14:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/the-right-trash-turning-waste-into-renewable-energy\/"},"modified":"2017-09-05T17:54:16","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T21:54:16","slug":"the-right-trash-turning-waste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/the-right-trash-turning-waste\/","title":{"rendered":"The right trash: turning waste into renewable energy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I came across two interesting posts about the recycling of waste into energy sources. First, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.renewableenergyworld.com\/\">Renewable Energy World <\/a>wrote a piece about the topic with emphasis on municipal waste. The article says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153In 2007, the US produced 254 million tons of municipal solid waste\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, and this ranges from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153organic material in landfills to waste from the chemical industry that must be treated as hazardous material\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. <\/p>\n<p>What to do with all this? Incineration is not the best option because of the toxic material produced by this process. A better option is the technology that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.inentec.com\/\">InEnTec <\/a>has developed, called Plasma Enhanced Melter, or PEM\u00e2\u201e\u00a2, which consists of heating \u00e2\u20ac\u0153waste to very high temperatures using electrically charged gas (plasma), breaking down organic material and creating a variety of products.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The company applied its technology for the first time on a commercial-scale production facility earlier this year where it converted household garbage into ethanol for cars and trucks.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153InEnTec\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Plasma Enhanced Melter has huge advantages over both conventional ethanol production and conventional waste disposal,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Jeffrey Surma, President and CEO of InEnTec. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It is a conversion system and not an incineration process, so emissions are extremely low with very low CO2 emissions. The feedstock is garbage or industrial waste. This means one of the modern world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most vexing problems\u00e2\u20ac\u201dhow to get rid of tons and tons of garbage\u00e2\u20ac\u201dnow becomes one of its most abundant energy resources. It doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t compete with the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s food supply or even cultivatable land, and it significantly reduces the need for landfills which produce greenhouse gases and can leach toxins into groundwater,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Surma added.<\/p>\n<p>Elsewhere, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iht.com\/articles\/2007\/11\/13\/news\/renmeth.php\">International Herald Tribune<\/a> has an article about the experiences of different cities with turning trash into biogas, which is great because it does two things at the same time: waste disposal and energy regeneration. It sounds like the kind of stuff we should be aiming at and local governments have an important role to play in the production of biomethane. They should start taking it  more seriously than they currently are.<\/p>\n<p><!--adsense--><\/p>\n<h3 class='related_post_title'>Related Posts:<\/h3><ul class='related_post'><li>No Related Posts Found! Go find some...<\/li><\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I came across two interesting posts about the recycling of waste into energy sources. First, Renewable Energy World wrote a piece about the topic with emphasis on municipal waste. The article says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153In 2007, the US produced 254 million tons of municipal solid waste\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, and this ranges from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153organic material in landfills to waste from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,21,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alternative-energy","category-recycling","category-transportation"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9736,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions\/9736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.energyrefuge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}