Trash-to-Energy Planned Coming to America
Europe has been burning trash for energy for a while. Oslo, Norway burns so much trash that it actually imports trash to burn. But the process of burning trash for energy has never caught on in America. Until now. On Monday the Spanish engineering company Abengoa announced it was building a gabrage-to-energy plant outside of Glendale, Arizona.
From Gigaom.com:
On Monday Abengoa said it plans to build a $110 million factory in Glendale that will turn city garbage into electricity. Chicago-based power company Vieste Energy will own the planned factory, and Abengoa will build it and run it for 30 years. Construction will take 20 months, and create 50 jobs, says Abengoa. When fully built, the factory is supposed to be able to gasify 180,000 tons of garbage per year, produce 350 tons of gas per day, and create 15 MW of electricity.
This type of factory planned for Glendale gasifies many types of waste, not just organic waste, but also plastics. In contrast, other biogas plants built sporadically around the U.S. — most commonly at landfills and water treatment facilities — put organic waste into bioreactors, which captures the gas that is produced as the organic materials decompose.
In our on going search for renewable energy we often forget about the one renewable resource that will never go away: garbage. We often equate burning garbage with the nasty noxious smogs that haunted the streets of 19th Century industrialized cities. But garbage burned for energy today meets strict emissions standards so garbage into energy may be a piece of our future’s renewable energy puzzle.
Until then Green Clean Junk Removal Services provides trash removal and garbage pick up in Los Angeles and New York.
