Establish 10 Waste to Energy Plants in Florida

The whole, entire United States needs to switch from putting garbage in landfills to burning trash in waste-to-energy plants to not only reduce our waste problem, but to also to convert local trash into heat and electricity.
All of the world's countries see that Americans are lagging behind on this new environmentally friendly way to reduce waste and covert it in to clean heat and energy. The reason why America should switch to this method is because it is cleaner than conventional incinerators and this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity.
Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago. Their use has not only reduces energy costs and reliance on oil and gas, but also benefited the environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
The plants run so cleanly that many times more dioxin is now released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues than from incineration.
For example, Denmark now has 29 such plants, serving 98 municipalities in a country of 5.5 million people, and 10 more are planned or under construction. Across Europe, there are about 400 plants, with Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands leading the pack in expanding them and building new ones.
So come on America and support our conclusion on burning our waste and save the environment for a better, clean future.
Thank You America.
I want to convince America that Waste-to-energy plants are going to help and save the environment by explaining the Global WTE developments that are happening around the world. During the 2001-2007 period, the WTE capacity increased by about four million metric tons per annum.
Japan and China built several plants that were based on direct smelting or on fluidized bed combustion of solid waste. In China there are about 50 WTE plants. Japan is the largest user in thermal treatment of MSW in the world with 40 million tons.
Some of the newest plants use stoker technology and others use the advanced oxygen enrichment technology. There are also over one hundred thermal treatment plants using relatively novel processes such as direct smelting, the Ebara fluidization process and the Thermo- select -JFE gasification and melting technology process.
In Patras,Greece, a Greek company just finished testing a system that shows potential.
It generates 25kwatts of electricity and 25kwatts of heat from waste water. In India its first energy bio-science center was developed to reduce the country’s green house gases and its dependency on fossil fuel.
Gasification and pyrolysis by now can reach gross thermal conversion efficiencies (fuel to gas) up to 75%, however a complete combustion is superior in terms of fuel conversion efficiency. Some pyrolysis processes need an outside heat source which may be supplied by the gasification process, making the combined process self-sustaining.
Bio Energy incorporated predicts that the plant will produce approximately 10.5 million gallons per year of ethanol.
explaining to America the process of incineration in the Waste-to-energy plants might help with this petition.
Incineration, the combustion of organic material such as waste with energy recovery, is the most common WTE implementation. All new WTE plants in OECDcountries incinerating waste (residual MSW, commercial, industrial or RDF must meet strict emission standards, including those on nitrogen oxides (NOx) sulphur dioxide (SO2), heavy metals and dioxins.
Hence, modern incineration plants are vastly different from old types, some of which neither recovered energy nor materials.
Modern incinerators reduce the volume of the original waste by 95-96 percent, depending upon composition and degree of recovery of materials such as metals from the ash for recycling.
Incinerators may emit fine particulate, heavy metals, trace dioxin and acid gas, even though these emissions are relatively low from modern incinerators. Other concerns include proper management of residues: toxic fly ash, which must be handled in hazardous waste disposal installation as well as incinerator bottom ash (IBA), which must be reused properly.
Critics argue that incinerators destroy valuable resources and they may reduce incentives for recycling. The question, however, is an open one, as countries in Europe recycling the most (up to 70%) also incinerate their residual waste to avoid landfilling.Incinerators have electric efficiencies of 14-28%.
In order to avoid losing the rest of the energy, it can be used for e.g. district heating(cogeneration].
The total efficiencies of cogeneration incinerators are typically higher than 80% (based on the lower heating value of the waste), and may even exceed 100% when equipped with flue gas condensation.
The method of using incineration to convert municipal solid waste (MSW) to energy is a relatively old method of WTE production. Incineration generally entails burning waste (residual MSW, commercial, industrial and RDF) to boil water which powers steam generators that make electric energy and heat to be used in homes, businesses, institutions and industries.
One problem associated with incinerating MSW to make electrical energy, is the potential for pollutants to enter the atmosphere with the flue gases from the boiler. These pollutants can be acidic and in the 1980s were reported to cause environmental damage by turning rain into acid rain.
Since then, the industry has removed this problem by the use of lime scrubbers and electro-static precipitators on smokestacks.
By passing the smoke through the basic lime scrubbers, any acids that might be in the smoke are neutralized which prevents the acid from reaching the atmosphere and hurting the environment.
Many other devices such as fabric filters, reactors and catalysts destroy or capture other regulated pollutants. According to the New York Times, modern incineration plants are so clean that "many times more dioxin is now released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues than from incineration.
" According to the German Environmental Ministry, "because of stringent regulations, waste incineration plants are no longer significant in terms of emissions of dioxins, dust, and heavy metals".
Most WTE processes produce electricity and/or heat directly through combustion, or produce a combustible fuel commodity such as synthetic fuels.
MSW to a large extent is of biological origin (biogenic), e.g. paper, cardboard, wood, cloth, food scraps. Typically half of the energy content in MSW is from biogenic material.Consequently, this energy is often recognized as renewable energy according to the waste input.
Several methods have been developed by the European CEN 343 working group to determine the biomass fraction of waste fuels, such as Refuse Derived Fuel/Solid Recovered Fuel. The initial two methods developed (CEN/TS 15440) were the manual sorting method and the selective dissolution method. A detailed systematic comparison of these two methods was published in 2010.
Since each method suffered from limitations in properly characterizing the biomass fraction, two alternative methods have been developed.
The first method uses the principles of radiocarbon dating. A technical review (CEN/TR 15591:2007) outlining the carbon 14 method was published in 2007. A technical standard of the carbon dating method (CEN/TS 15747:2008) will be published in 2008.
In the United States, there is already an equivalent carbon 14 method under the standard method ASTM D6866.
The second method (so-called balance method) employs existing data on materials composition and operating conditions of the WTE plant and calculates the most probable result based on a mathematical-statistical model. Currently the balance method is installed at three Austrian and eight Danish incinerators.
A comparison between both methods carried out at three full-scale incinerators in Switzerland showed that both methods came to the same results.
Carbon 14 dating can determine with precision the biomass fraction of waste, and also determine the biomass calorific value. Determining the calorific value is important for green certificate programs such as the Renewable Obligation Certificate program in the United Kingdom.
These programs award certificates based on the energy produced from biomass. Several research papers, including the one commissioned by the Renewable Energy Association in the UK, have been published that demonstrate how the carbon 14 result can be used to calculate the biomass calorific value.
The UK gas and electricity markets authority, Of gem, released a statement in 2011 accepting the use of Carbon 14 as a way to determine the biomass energy content of waste feedstock under their administration of the Renewables Obligation.Their Fuel Measurement and Sampling (FMS) questionnaire describes the information they look for when considering such proposals.
My results that I have recorded for my conclusion on the method of burning trash and converting the waste to heat and electricity in the waste-to-energy plants are interpreting carbon dioxide emissions.
In thermal WTE technologies, nearly all of the carbon content in the waste is emitted as carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere (when including final combustion of the products from pyrolysis and gasification; except when producing bio-char for fertilizer).
Municipal solid waste (MSW]contain approximately the same mass fraction of carbon as CO2 itself (27%), so treatment of 1 metric ton (1.1 short tons) of MSW produce approximately 1 metric ton (1.1 short tons) of CO2.
In the event that the waste was landfilled, 1 metric ton (1.1 short tons) of MSW would produce approximately 62 cubic meters (2,200 cu ft.) methane via the anaerobic decomposition of the biodegradable part of the waste. This amount of methane has more than twice the global warming potential than the 1 metric ton (1.1 short tons) of CO2, which would have been produced by combustion.
In some countries, large amounts of landfill gas are collected, but still the global warming potential of the landfill gas emitted to atmosphere in e.g. the US in 1999 was approximately 32% higher than the amount of CO2 that would have been emitted by combustion.
In addition, nearly all biodegradable waste is biomass. That is, it has biological origin. This material has been formed by plants using atmospheric CO2 typically within the last growing season. If these plants are regrown the CO2 emitted from their combustion will be taken out from the atmosphere once more.
Such considerations are the main reason why several countries administrate WTE of the biomass part of waste as renewable energy. The rest—mainly plastics and other oil and gas derived products—is generally treated as non-renewables. Embracing the technology would not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions and local pollution, but also yield copious electricity.
The study also concluded that waste-to-energy plants produced lower levels of pollutants than the best landfills did, but nine times the energy.
Although new landfills are lined to prevent leaks of toxic substances and often capture methane, the process is highly inefficient.
I will state my final thoughts and facts about my waste-to-energy plants. From a pollution perspective, today’s energy-generating incinerators have little in common with the smoke-belching models of the past.
They have arrays of newly developed filters and scrubbers to capture the offending chemicals — hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, dioxins, furans and heavy metals — as well as small particulates.
Emissions from the plants in all categories have been reduced to just 10 to 20 percent of levels allowed under the European Union’s strict environmental standards for air and water discharges.
At the end of the incineration process, the extracted acids, heavy metals and gypsum are sold for use in manufacturing or construction. Small amounts of highly concentrated toxic substances, forming a paste, are shipped to one of two warehouses for highly hazardous materials, in the Norwegian fjords and in a used salt mine in Germany.
“The hazardous elements are concentrated and handled with care rather than dispersed as they would be in a landfill,” said Ivar Green-Paulsen, general manager of the Vestforbraending plant in Copenhagen, the country’s largest.
In Denmark, local governments run trash collection as well as the incinerators and recycling centers, and laws and financial incentives ensure that recyclable materials are not burned. (In the United States most waste-to-energy plants are private ventures.) Communities may drop recyclable waste at recycling centers free of charge, but must pay to have garbage incinerated.
While new, state-of-the-art landfills do collect the methane that emanates from rotting garbage to make electricity, they churn out roughly twice as much climate-warming gas as waste-to-energy plants do for the units of power they produce, the 2009 E.P.A. study found.
Methane, the primary warming gas emitted by landfills, is about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, the gas released by burning garbage.
The study also concluded that waste-to-energy plants produced lower levels of pollutants than the best landfills did, but nine times the energy. Although new landfills are lined to prevent leaks of toxic substances and often capture methane, the process is highly inefficient. Waste-to-energy plants burn trash at temperatures reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The inferno turns water to steam and runs turbines to produce electricity. The trash is separated into ash and flue gases. Metals, acids, and other toxic chemicals are removed from the gas through a series of filters, leaving only CO2 and water vapor. The ash—still toxic but volume much reduced—is carted off to line landfills.
Labeling waste-to-energy as renewable competes with other favored strategies like wind and solar.
And shouldn’t we focus on recycling more stuff, instead of just burning it? It takes less energy to repurpose already constituted industrial materials than building them up new—plus, it saves resources.
Why let garbage go to waste and create major problems like erosion or health issues, when you can convert it to electricity and energy.
This energy can help us heat houses more efficiently and run factories and businesses longer.
I mean, for God's sake, European countries are ahead of us for this unique process.
The only question that I ask you America is, "Why are we waiting and doing nothing to stop the overflow of landfills"?
To me, if I may ask, this is a revolutionary idea to make our health last longer and environment a safer place to live in.
So get with the program America, and lets burn our garbage to make useful energy for a great, big, beautiful tomorrow.
The waste to energy plants should be located in the following counties in Florida; Walton, Liberty, Gulf, Santa Rosa, Monroe, Citrus, Orange, Lake, Palm Beach, and Bay County.