Powering cities on landfill waste | CNET News.com
Powering cities on landfill waste | CNET News.com
I’ve gone from living in NJ, a densely populated U.S. state, to Tokyo, the most densely populated city in the world. Am I a masochist? I think it’s a lower resource dependant living. I found an idea that both NJ and Tokyo could take advantage of:
To summarize
The process Ze-gen is testing is cleaner than incinerating trash and avoids the production of methane–a potent greenhouse gas–from landfills, said Jim Matheson, a general partner at Flagship Ventures.
“In all the hubbub about energy, clean tech and sustainability more broadly, we think waste has been overlooked both from the dimension of the energy value of the waste and the environmental impact,” Matheson said.
…Ze-gen’s New Bedford facility is designed to handle a specific kind of waste stream–the debris from construction and demolition sites, rather than household waste–which will bring in a more uniform input.…But a facility like this one has the potential to gasify 450 tons of waste and generate 30 megawatts of electricity a day–enough power for roughly 10,000 households–in addition to the 8 megawatts needed to run the plant itself.
…Using municipal solid waste as a feedstock hasn’t yet taken off because in the past there wasn’t much interest in alternative fuels and people underestimated the material handling requirements, Ze-gen’s Davis said.
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