Monday, October 3, 2011

Burn, baby, Burn!

After sorting our waste into recycling bins and organics pails, there will always remain some items that will head off to a landfill near (or maybe not so near) you. Depending on what your municipality chooses to do, that garbage might be compacted and shipped to a distant landfill, or just trucked straight to a local landfill, or maybe even sent to an incinerator facility. The Region of Peel has been burning trash for 20 years and is quite proud of their waste volume reduction in landfills. Not only do they burn the waste, but they capture the thermal energy of the incineration and produce power using steam and gas generators. This isn't a perfect burn, naturally, so there is ash and airborne pollutants to deal with after the garbage is burned. Instead of tonnes of raw waste oozing unknown liquid toxins and airing out methane, these pollutants are smaller in volume and created in a more controlled and understood environment. Perhaps there is a future in waste-to-power incinerators.
Peel's Waste Management division made a video highlighting their Brampton Incineration facility run by Algonquin Power, Inc: see it here

Hopefully they allow me a visit and I can follow up with some photos of a tour of the place!

So why would an incinerator be of interest  to someone investigating an old landfill and a new recycling facility? What I have in mind might be a little unconventional, but with some more research I'll  be able to say with better certainty if this is a possible and reasonable undertaking:

What if we excavated the capped landfill? From 1950 through 1980, tonnes of primarily residential garbage was piled on the Upper Ottawa Street Landfill site. Research done in the US shows that paper is the singularly largest occupant of landfills by volume (40%), research sites were excavated from 1960-1980. (The Garbage Project, University of Arizona) Imagine how many recyclable things are sitting under that cap, preserved with no airflow and no sunlight for over 30 years. By excavating the landfill, it just might be possible to reprocess the recyclable and organic items, and incinerate the remainder. Could the methane that is trapped deep in the mound also be captured and used for power conversion? What would all this look like, if we were to put it into a building, and combine it with a MRF for today's recyclables and organic goods? And what happens to this building when the landfill has been fully excavated and there is nothing but new recyclables coming in? Why, the facility should be re-cycled and put to a new use. The equipment used to sort and handle all the excavated material could be moved to another similar facility at another closed landfill being encroached upon by suburbia. This is a one-time locally-inspired proposal, but could be a design scheme applicable to other municipalities with similar issues. (Goodness knows we have enough of those in Ontario alone)

By the time that the area surrounding the Upper Ottawa Street Landfill is fully developed, there could be a local MRF (maybe powered by it's own incinerators), a community centre, a public park, a new storm water management plan, and a cleaner source for the Red Hill Creek.

I think there might be a thesis in here...

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