NY Times - page 2 Chinese Incinerators Pollute Air

Trash incinerators have two advantages that have prompted Japan and much of Europe to embrace them: they occupy much less real estate than landfills, and the heat from burning trash can be used to generate electricity. The Baoan incinerator generates enough power to light 40,000 households.

Timothy O'Rourke for The New York Times
Zhong Rigang, the chief engineer at the Baoan incinerator, saw little enthusiasm among the public for recycling.

Timothy O’Rourke for The New York Times
The Longgang incinerators in Shenzhen were the focus of a recent all-day sit-in by hundreds of local residents.

A blog about energy, the environment and the bottom line.

And landfills have their own environmental hazards. Decay in landfills also releases large quantities of methane, a powerful global warming gas, said Robert McIlvaine, president of McIlvaine Company, an energy consulting firm that calculates the relative costs of addressing disparate environmental hazards. Methane from landfills is a far bigger problem in China than toxic pollutants from incinerators, particularly modern incinerators like those in Baoan, he said.

China’s national regulations still allow incinerators to emit 10 times as much dioxin as incinerators in the European Union; American standards are similar to those in Europe. Tightening of China’s national standards has been stuck for three years in a bureaucratic war between the environment ministry and the main economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, said a Beijing official who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject publicly.

The agencies agree that tighter standards on dioxin emissions are needed. They disagree on whether the environment ministry should have the power to stop incinerator projects that do not meet tighter standards, the official said, adding that the planning agency wants to retain the power to decide which projects go ahead.

Yan Jianhua, the director of the solid waste treatment expert group in Zhejiang province, a center of incinerator equipment manufacturing in China, defended the industry’s record on dioxin, saying that households that burn their trash outdoors emit far more dioxin.

“Open burning is a bigger problem according to our research,” Professor Yan said, adding that what China really needs is better trash collection so that garbage can be disposed of more reliably.

Critics and admirers of incinerators alike call for more recycling and reduced use of packaging as ways to reduce the daily volume of municipal garbage. Even when not recycled, sorted trash is easier for incinerators to burn cleanly, because the temperature in the furnace can be adjusted more precisely to minimize the formation of dioxin.

Yet the Chinese public has shown little enthusiasm for recycling. As Mr. Zhong, the engineer at the Baoan incinerator, put it, “No one really cares.”

Old tires + manure= energy

OREGON ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS
Going green, green living, eco friendly tips and articles

INSIDE ENVIRONMENT

• Environmental News
• PDX Green Blog
• Earth Day
• Oregonian Newspaper
• Oregon Traffic News
• Weather Center
• Oregon & Washington Earthquake News
• Contact the Environment & Sustainability Team
• Send us news & photos

GREEN TIPS
A guide to a more efficient and sustainable life.
• Green Tip: Sorting shades of fluorescent bulbs 7:30 p.m. PT
• Coloring eggs this weekend? Try going natural 12:30 p.m. PT
• Fair offers resources for installing ecoroofs 12:30 p.m. PT
MORE GREEN TIPS »
ENVIRONMENT PHOTOS
From The Oregonian


MORE ENVIRONMENT PHOTOS »
HOMES & GARDENS MAGAZINE

Green Living ›
Organic Gardening ›
Sustainability Leaders ›

• Wis. Senate approves e-waste recycling bill 6/9/2009, 10:17 a.m. PDT

• Small-town farmers' markets gain a following 6/8/2009, 1:00 a.m. PDT

• Ore. lawmakers take aim at school bus fumes 6/5/2009, 4:07 p.m. PDT

AP ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS »

• US Forest SVC on Plant... by Sponge27 06/15/2009 8:44 a.m. PT

Biogas company seeks permit to use 40,000 waste tires for manure digester
by Abby Haight, The Oregonian
Wednesday June 03, 2009, 11:36 AM

Motoya Nakamura/The Oregonian

Dairy production at Threemile Canyon Farms near Boardman.A biogas company wants a permit to produce energy from two banes to the environment -- waste tires and cow manure.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality will host an informational meeting at 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 9, in Boardman to discuss the waste tire storage permit application of Northwest Biogas, which wants to use 40,000 waste tires as a growing media for micro-organisms in an anaerobic digester.

The digester would be at Threemile Canyon Farms in Boardman, one of the largest dairies in the country, and would use manure from the farm's 17,000 cows.

Late last year, Threemile Canyon Farms entered an agreement with Northwest Natural Gas and the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to install a digester that would clean methane -- one of the worst greenhouse gases -- and produce an alternative to natural gas use.

Northwest Natural and the foundation invested $1 million in the digester project. Northwest Natural, which benefited from state tax credits, would fund the $20,000 yearly operating cost by its 6,300 customers who pay extra for green energy projects.

Northwest Biogas has proposed using the waste tires inside the lined and covered digester. The company has agreed to clean, remove and recycle the tires if the facility ceases operation.

The dairy cows each produce 120 pounds of waste daily, including water used to flush away the manure. The waste is routed into manure lagoons, where it releases methane. The digester would use only a fraction of the manure -- from about 1,000 to 1,400 cows.

But proponents note that the cleaned methane is a renewable alternative to natural gas. Generators also use methane to produce electricity.

Using waste tires eliminates the potential for tire fires and the breeding ground for pests like mosquitoes, they say.

The informational meeting is at the Boardman City Hall conference room, 200 City Center Circle.

-- Abby Haight; abbyhaight@news.oregonian.com

Cow Poop to Electricity in California

by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 03.11.08
Science & Technology (alternative energy)

You can almost smell the photo above: "a vat of liquid cow manure covering the area of five football fields and 33 feet deep". Ew. But as long as we are stuck with all that manure from industrial farms (and aren't using it locally like on the Polyface Farm), something might as well be done with it.

The Vintage Dairy Biogas Project, the project of dairyman David Albers, wants to provide enough natural gas to power 1,200 homes a day. "As cow manure decomposes, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. Scientists say controlling methane emissions from animals such as cows would be a major step in addressing climate change."

To tap the renewable gas from cow manure, the Vintage Dairy farm first flushes manure into a large, octagonal pit, where it becomes about 99 percent water. It is then pumped into a covered lagoon, first passing through a screen that filters out large solids that eventually become the cows' bedding. [...]
Weights on top of the digester channel the gas to the small facility where it is "scrubbed" of hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide. The end product is "close to 99 percent pure methane" according to BioEnergy Chief Operating Officer Thomas Hintz.


The the gas is injected into PG&E's pipeline, where it will be shipped to a power plant in Northern California.

There are many other manure lagoons like that one that aren't capturing the methane, so that seems like the thing to do both economically and environmentally.

A second dairy in Fresno county has already agreed to join the Vintage Dairy project and Albers estimated gas from the two dairies combined could power 2,500 homes a day.
It would probably be a good idea to start thinking about harnessing biogas from other sources as well. There's a low of cows, but there's also a lot of us. How about human sewage?

::California cows start passing gas to the grid

See also: ::TreeHugger Picks: Behold - The Power of Poo, ::Biogas: Poo-Powered Prison in Rwanda, ::Human Poop and Urine Provide Cheap Biogas Source in Uganda, ::Bio-Digesters in India: Nothing Wasted, A Lot More Gained

Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
Big Oil to Become Big Biofuels?
The Return of the Lowly and Lovely Cowslip
Will Allen: "Industrial Agriculture One of Most Polluting & Dangerous Industries"
Are Vertical Farms the Answer After All?