Singapore burns their trash but they also purify the smoke coming out from it. The trapped carbon ash is then turned into bricks that can be used for construction.
Usually a combination of not enough land for landfill and or advanced enough incinerators that they can generate energy from the rubbish as well as ensure only CO2 and water vapour are leaving the top as gasses.
They don’t have much land for landfills to bury their trash. They need to be creative and find solutions that don’t involve taking up valuable resources (land, vegetation, etc)
It depends. There’s definitely trash you shouldn’t burn. But also a lot that can be burned relatively cleanly. Of course, that’s still bad, unless you use the burning for something useful. Burning stuff produces heat, so you can use it to generate electricty. You can also use it to provide heating for nearby cities.
Some countries do both. First you sort the trash to get rid of the stuff that shouldn’t be burned. Then you burn the rest in a power plant, as cleanly as possible. You use the heat to generate electricity, and then you pipe the rest of the heat out through piping to heat people’s homes.
Then it’s quite good.
If you just piled your trash up in the back yard and lit it on fire, that would be… less good.
Remember that in Japan they are very, very diligent with their waste treatment. It means that the garbage they incinerate is the one that can’t be recycled or composted anymore. Burning that kind of trash is no worse to the environment than fossil fuels.
Japan and Singapore are both very limited in area with very little room for landfills. Landfills are expensive to begin with but for those nations it’s outright impossible – they’d have to export their waste which is also very expensive (pay for transport, pay for a buyer to dispose).
Burning trash emits a lot of air pollutants. Some facilities are better equipped and use the heat for generating electricity or district heating, or both (co-generation).
Other countries with less regulations and less facilities often opt to just burn piles of trash. This is the least preferred method since it releases air pollutants and the energy is not reused, but often this is the only possible way for them to dispose of trash.
My area in Massachusetts burns trash. If done right, it is clean. The temperature is hot enough to break all molecular bonds. The metals melt and sink into a slag on the bottom that can be recycled, and the other elements are run through filtering fluid. They produce very little visible smoke, and is moslty just steam from cooling towers.
Source: so many middle school field trips. The sewer treatment facility also harvests solid waste for burning, and the water is cleaner than the river it is discharged into. It makes a city of 100,000 a net-0 waste producer.
For Singapore, studies have proven that regardless of investment, recycling garbage actually uses up more resources than burning it due to the small nature of country. Setting up a system to recycle will actually cost more resources even in the long run. It becomes no longer a trade off between being lazy and resource mindful. Burning garbage is actually the right option as we lose more resources recycling than we get out of it as compared to just burning.
Burning stuff in your backyard is bad, but incinerators usually also have things like electrostatic scrubbers that will actually make it a very clean process.
This is a complicated question to answer because it’s not a simple answer.
Countries like Japan don’t have an abundance of land, so using landfills is not as feasible as it is in countries like the US. That’s the why.
Whether it’s better for the environment or not is also debatable. I am not super familiar with Singapore’s process, but Japan’s waste program is exceptionally thorough in its attempt to maximize gains and minimize ecological impact. They capture and utilize the heat energy produced by burning trash and add it to their power grid, while at the same time they use cutting edge filtration systems to minimize pollution, and repurpose carbon emissions as building materials.
Because of this process it appears like they have found a way to make burning trash better for the environment than landfills are.
But if we are comparing just burning trash to landfills, without these steps being taken landfills are much better for the environment.
Also with the landfill approach it’s not like we just dig a hole and fill it either. We use an array of techniques to prevent potentially toxic waste from getting into the ground or water supply, and we often do recapture methane gas emissions from waste and use those for power too. It’s just nowhere near as efficient and totally controlled as Japan’s waste burning program.
However we do have parts of the US that use systems that are very similar to the Japanese waste burning system too. Hawaii for example burns their trash in a similar program. It’s not quite as efficient and complete as the Japanese program, but it is better the landfill programs the rest of the country uses. It just also happens to be much more expensive than conventional landfills.
One thing to look at is the cost relative to landfill. Countries where land is plentiful/cheap, (e.g. North America) tend to use landfill for disposal. In places where sites for landfill is limited, they tend to favour combustion.
Burning trash produces a lot of bad chemicals, like dioxins. Historically incinerators had a bad reputation because of this. Modern incinerators have a lot of equipment to scrub pollutants, so even though that bad stuff is emitted, it’s captured and not released to the environment in any significant amount. Some countries still resist incineration because of that old reputation though.
A last point, is that some people feel like spending a lot of money on incinerators creates a situation where you want to keep them running at full capacity and that can actually hinder other efforts like recycling that are seen to be better. I.e. even though recycling is the preferred option environmentally, if you have an incinerator it’s just easier to burn everything. Im not sure how much evidence there is of this effect, but it is a perception that does work against incineration in some places.
There is this concept of recovering energy. When you manufacture products like plastics you are putting energy into it because of certain laws of thermodynamics, and storing it as chemical energy. When that plastic no longer has value, burning it is essentially recovering that energy by converting into heat and that heat into electricity. That way you are creating some sort of circular energy circle (a very inefficient one tough), as long as you are burning it in a thermal-electric plant and not in a yard. On the other hand, burning plastics produces CO2 emissions so it’s not an optimal solution. It also avoid the need for huge surfaces of yards, which is a problem in small countries like those you mention.
Burning trash in yards only helps to avoid the huge yards but does not produce any other benefit.
Uh, because I’m recycling the trash into heat for the bar and lots of smoke for the country. I’m giving the country the good smoky smell that we all like.
I’m sorry. Well, I could put the trash into a landfill where it’s going to stay for millions of years, or I could burn it up and get a nice smoky smell in here and let that smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
I’m a Singaporean. If you haven’t been there you can drive from one side of the country to the other in about half an hour. Maybe an hour if there’s traffic. If we buried it in landfills locally, the country will be nothing but trash. Malaysians may argue that Singapore is “nothing but trash” right now, but that’s just a bit mean.
Can we export it? Sure. If you can find a taker. China has banned imports of garbage. So has Malaysia. Maybe Indonesia, but they’re just going to burn it in open pits and the smog is going to blow over right back home anyway – boomerang right back home like a kid with a liberal arts degree. Just dumping it into international waters is going to really make things thorny diplomatically. So into the incinerator it goes.
Trash incinerators are commonly used as an energy source for large city-wide central heating systems.
The reasoning begins with the conclusion that a landfill is not an environment friendly idea. You will with near-certainty pollute the ground water, when you place a massive pile of…stuff that you are not entirely sure about in a hole. If you prepare the hole first and add a concrete sarcophagus, you will get less pollution. But at a comparably higher cost. And you’ll sit there with a pile of trash that you leave for later generations to deal with.
For that reason, it’s quite…attractive to burn the trash and see it go up in smoke. Which of course adds air pollution instead.
So…why do we still do it?
Well, to begin with, one of the things with central heating is that it is in itself an idea that is more environment friendly than having thousands of small energy sources in every single home – as long as you have state-of-the-art catalytic cleaning on the exhaust pipe. But it clearly IS an incinerator. You burn shit and it causes exhaust fumes that the environment would rather be without.
But if you refit the incinerator so that it’s intended to use trash as a fuel source rather than petroleum, you will shift from a power source that you have to import (which is not true in every country in the world) to a power source that your citizens will happily give you for free. And on the regular too.
And the incinerator that just produces hot water that you can circulate in pipes around the city, can also be fitted with electrical turbines and be turned into an electrical power plant.
And there you have it. A combination that is…not environment friendly, but environment…friendlier than the alternatives.
You can’t talk yourself out of the need of heating in some climates. And since it’s not negotiable, you instead focus on removing small heat sources and combining them into a handful industrial-size facilities that have better resources for catalytic processes and such. And when you control the facilities, you would rather get fuel sent to you more or less for free, rather than having to import fossil fuel from abroad.
And as a consequence, trash does not end up in a landfill. Instead it’s incinerated and turned into heat and electricity.
THAT is what makes the equation somewhat viable. Not awesome. But better than the alternatives, and that kind of counts too.
Comments
Singapore burns their trash but they also purify the smoke coming out from it. The
trapped carbonash is then turned into bricks that can be used for construction.Edit: Fixed
It’s not better for the envrioment, however, not all trash can easily be recycled and trash burning can be a way to generate electricity
Burn things in the yard = bad.
Burn things and harvest the energy = good.
Sort out what can be used again and burn the rest = best
Usually a combination of not enough land for landfill and or advanced enough incinerators that they can generate energy from the rubbish as well as ensure only CO2 and water vapour are leaving the top as gasses.
They don’t have much land for landfills to bury their trash. They need to be creative and find solutions that don’t involve taking up valuable resources (land, vegetation, etc)
It depends. There’s definitely trash you shouldn’t burn. But also a lot that can be burned relatively cleanly. Of course, that’s still bad, unless you use the burning for something useful. Burning stuff produces heat, so you can use it to generate electricty. You can also use it to provide heating for nearby cities.
Some countries do both. First you sort the trash to get rid of the stuff that shouldn’t be burned. Then you burn the rest in a power plant, as cleanly as possible. You use the heat to generate electricity, and then you pipe the rest of the heat out through piping to heat people’s homes.
Then it’s quite good.
If you just piled your trash up in the back yard and lit it on fire, that would be… less good.
As someone who has negative health outcomes from burn pits, I doubt it’s good to burn trash… or at least trash soaked in jet fuel.
Burning plastics creates dioxin. This is toxic (as per National Geographic) at a rate of one quart dissolved in 1000 railroad tank cars.
Remember that in Japan they are very, very diligent with their waste treatment. It means that the garbage they incinerate is the one that can’t be recycled or composted anymore. Burning that kind of trash is no worse to the environment than fossil fuels.
Japan and Singapore are both very limited in area with very little room for landfills. Landfills are expensive to begin with but for those nations it’s outright impossible – they’d have to export their waste which is also very expensive (pay for transport, pay for a buyer to dispose).
Burning trash emits a lot of air pollutants. Some facilities are better equipped and use the heat for generating electricity or district heating, or both (co-generation).
Other countries with less regulations and less facilities often opt to just burn piles of trash. This is the least preferred method since it releases air pollutants and the energy is not reused, but often this is the only possible way for them to dispose of trash.
Better for the environment is a hard thing to quantify. Better for some aspects, maybe worse in others.
My area in Massachusetts burns trash. If done right, it is clean. The temperature is hot enough to break all molecular bonds. The metals melt and sink into a slag on the bottom that can be recycled, and the other elements are run through filtering fluid. They produce very little visible smoke, and is moslty just steam from cooling towers.
Source: so many middle school field trips. The sewer treatment facility also harvests solid waste for burning, and the water is cleaner than the river it is discharged into. It makes a city of 100,000 a net-0 waste producer.
For Singapore, studies have proven that regardless of investment, recycling garbage actually uses up more resources than burning it due to the small nature of country. Setting up a system to recycle will actually cost more resources even in the long run. It becomes no longer a trade off between being lazy and resource mindful. Burning garbage is actually the right option as we lose more resources recycling than we get out of it as compared to just burning.
Historically, almost all trash was organic, so it would either burn or compost.
Once we started using plastic packaging, people continued to dispose of trash the same way, either by burning it or throwing it into the woods/river.
Even in modern countries the main method is simply to throw it all into the same place at a dump.
Burning stuff in your backyard is bad, but incinerators usually also have things like electrostatic scrubbers that will actually make it a very clean process.
This is a complicated question to answer because it’s not a simple answer.
Countries like Japan don’t have an abundance of land, so using landfills is not as feasible as it is in countries like the US. That’s the why.
Whether it’s better for the environment or not is also debatable. I am not super familiar with Singapore’s process, but Japan’s waste program is exceptionally thorough in its attempt to maximize gains and minimize ecological impact. They capture and utilize the heat energy produced by burning trash and add it to their power grid, while at the same time they use cutting edge filtration systems to minimize pollution, and repurpose carbon emissions as building materials.
Because of this process it appears like they have found a way to make burning trash better for the environment than landfills are.
But if we are comparing just burning trash to landfills, without these steps being taken landfills are much better for the environment.
Also with the landfill approach it’s not like we just dig a hole and fill it either. We use an array of techniques to prevent potentially toxic waste from getting into the ground or water supply, and we often do recapture methane gas emissions from waste and use those for power too. It’s just nowhere near as efficient and totally controlled as Japan’s waste burning program.
However we do have parts of the US that use systems that are very similar to the Japanese waste burning system too. Hawaii for example burns their trash in a similar program. It’s not quite as efficient and complete as the Japanese program, but it is better the landfill programs the rest of the country uses. It just also happens to be much more expensive than conventional landfills.
One thing to look at is the cost relative to landfill. Countries where land is plentiful/cheap, (e.g. North America) tend to use landfill for disposal. In places where sites for landfill is limited, they tend to favour combustion.
Burning trash produces a lot of bad chemicals, like dioxins. Historically incinerators had a bad reputation because of this. Modern incinerators have a lot of equipment to scrub pollutants, so even though that bad stuff is emitted, it’s captured and not released to the environment in any significant amount. Some countries still resist incineration because of that old reputation though.
A last point, is that some people feel like spending a lot of money on incinerators creates a situation where you want to keep them running at full capacity and that can actually hinder other efforts like recycling that are seen to be better. I.e. even though recycling is the preferred option environmentally, if you have an incinerator it’s just easier to burn everything. Im not sure how much evidence there is of this effect, but it is a perception that does work against incineration in some places.
There is this concept of recovering energy. When you manufacture products like plastics you are putting energy into it because of certain laws of thermodynamics, and storing it as chemical energy. When that plastic no longer has value, burning it is essentially recovering that energy by converting into heat and that heat into electricity. That way you are creating some sort of circular energy circle (a very inefficient one tough), as long as you are burning it in a thermal-electric plant and not in a yard. On the other hand, burning plastics produces CO2 emissions so it’s not an optimal solution. It also avoid the need for huge surfaces of yards, which is a problem in small countries like those you mention.
Burning trash in yards only helps to avoid the huge yards but does not produce any other benefit.
Japan and Singapore for example, but I bet your country sends your trash to them too. So you’re the problem
Uh, because I’m recycling the trash into heat for the bar and lots of smoke for the country. I’m giving the country the good smoky smell that we all like.
I’m sorry. Well, I could put the trash into a landfill where it’s going to stay for millions of years, or I could burn it up and get a nice smoky smell in here and let that smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
I’m a Singaporean. If you haven’t been there you can drive from one side of the country to the other in about half an hour. Maybe an hour if there’s traffic. If we buried it in landfills locally, the country will be nothing but trash. Malaysians may argue that Singapore is “nothing but trash” right now, but that’s just a bit mean.
Can we export it? Sure. If you can find a taker. China has banned imports of garbage. So has Malaysia. Maybe Indonesia, but they’re just going to burn it in open pits and the smog is going to blow over right back home anyway – boomerang right back home like a kid with a liberal arts degree. Just dumping it into international waters is going to really make things thorny diplomatically. So into the incinerator it goes.
Couple benefits here. It gives the bar that nice smoky smell that everyone loves And also, how do you think stars are made?
Trash incinerators are commonly used as an energy source for large city-wide central heating systems.
The reasoning begins with the conclusion that a landfill is not an environment friendly idea. You will with near-certainty pollute the ground water, when you place a massive pile of…stuff that you are not entirely sure about in a hole. If you prepare the hole first and add a concrete sarcophagus, you will get less pollution. But at a comparably higher cost. And you’ll sit there with a pile of trash that you leave for later generations to deal with.
For that reason, it’s quite…attractive to burn the trash and see it go up in smoke. Which of course adds air pollution instead.
So…why do we still do it?
Well, to begin with, one of the things with central heating is that it is in itself an idea that is more environment friendly than having thousands of small energy sources in every single home – as long as you have state-of-the-art catalytic cleaning on the exhaust pipe. But it clearly IS an incinerator. You burn shit and it causes exhaust fumes that the environment would rather be without.
But if you refit the incinerator so that it’s intended to use trash as a fuel source rather than petroleum, you will shift from a power source that you have to import (which is not true in every country in the world) to a power source that your citizens will happily give you for free. And on the regular too.
And the incinerator that just produces hot water that you can circulate in pipes around the city, can also be fitted with electrical turbines and be turned into an electrical power plant.
And there you have it. A combination that is…not environment friendly, but environment…friendlier than the alternatives.
You can’t talk yourself out of the need of heating in some climates. And since it’s not negotiable, you instead focus on removing small heat sources and combining them into a handful industrial-size facilities that have better resources for catalytic processes and such. And when you control the facilities, you would rather get fuel sent to you more or less for free, rather than having to import fossil fuel from abroad.
And as a consequence, trash does not end up in a landfill. Instead it’s incinerated and turned into heat and electricity.
THAT is what makes the equation somewhat viable. Not awesome. But better than the alternatives, and that kind of counts too.
The last time I checked, the US led the world in trash incinerated.
It’s not recycling. It’s putting the trash in the airfill rather than the landfill, with a bit of electricity being a byproduct.
Arguable about which is worse, and it depends a lot on how it’s done. But neither is good.