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Friday, February 10, 2012
Unsustainable Waste Disposal Practices
by David Prinzing, published on January 30, 2009 at 5:40 PM
Storyline: Waste-to-Energy
On January 15th, during a technical workshop that was poorly attended by the public and local media, the Sacramento City Council voted on a proposal that could wind up affecting the citizens of Sacramento for many years to come. The Council voted to table the City’s yearlong effort to replace the costly and environmentally detrimental practice of trucking Sacramento’s non-recyclable municipal solid waste (MSW) over the mountains to a landfill east of Reno, Nevada with a sustainable, less costly and more environmentally friendly waste-to-energy (WTE) approach.
Our Sacramento-based company, U.S. Science & Technology, submitted a proposal that was ultimately selected from among 11 responses to the city’s request for proposals. We were obviously disappointed in the Council’s decision to table any further action on this matter for the time being due to their concerns with the City’s handling of the vetting process. However, we remain committed to helping the City find alternative solutions to trucking and landfilling 400 tons of garbage each day. We also believe this can be done in a way that delivers significant economic benefits to Sacramento in the form of hundreds of jobs, substantial corporate tax revenues and millions of dollars in savings to ratepayers. Not a bad “green” deal in the midst of an economic crisis.
As many readers likely recall, over a year ago the City Council requested alternative proposals to the current unsustainable arrangement of shipping our non-recyclable trash to landfills. Understanding the city’s environmental and economic objectives, USST responded to the request with a proposal to implement a WTE facility using a state-of-the-art high-temperature gasification technology. This environmentally friendly and sustainable approach for disposing of the City’s municipal solid waste was approved time and time again by the City Council.
However, as the process unfolded, it became clear that some were unhappy with the process itself and there were a litany of city political concerns at play behind the scenes. All of this eventually led to the unfortunate tabling of the proposal.
We are engineers and scientists, not politicians, so it’s difficult for us to be certain exactly how and why this effort became so politicized and eventually got derailed. However, as a Sacramento-based company and as private citizens of this great city, we are concerned about what hasn’t been derailed: the trucking of this massive amount of non-recyclable waste to landfills over the mountains. We’ve presented an approach that would end this practice, to the benefit of the City, ratepayers and the environment. A high-temperature gasification WTE facility represents a scalable integration of proven technologies that, taken together, represents a practicable, safe, and efficient solution. The high-temperature gasification technology proposed by USST is proven, offers no financial risk to Sacramento, and is now being touted by many experts around the world as the best available technology for 100% conversion of garbage to commercial products like electricity and transportation fuels.
In fact, in an uncertain economic climate and in the midst of California’s unprecedented budget crisis, the proposed WTE facility would afford many benefits to the City:
- A savings of millions of dollars for Sacramento citizens, notably on the trucking costs to Nevada;
- The potential generation of substantial amounts of tax revenue for the city;
- The creation of hundreds of new jobs throughout the conception, construction, and operation of the facility;
- Assistance in helping the City meet its stated “green initiative” objectives; and
- Quantifiable reduction of green house gas emissions and waste.
We are a local company of engineers, scientists and business leaders committed to environmental solutions in the waste-to-energy sector. We continue to offer a solution that we sincerely believe would be effective, environmentally and economically beneficial, and would present absolutely no financial risk to the City of Sacramento.
But regardless of the solution, Sacramento and its residents should not and cannot ignore the issue at hand. We hope the City Council puts this issue back at the forefront of the City agenda. In the meantime, we will continue exploring ways to help the city meet its environmental and economic standards while also developing and delivering a feasible solution to the unsustainable practice of landfilling 400 tons of Sacramento’s non-recyclable waste each and every day.
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For a thorough analysis of the problems with the proposed incinerator, the misinformation behind it, and an unproven track record, please visit: http://www.greenaction.org/incinerators/documents/GreenactionSacramentoPlasmaReport082608.pdf
The greenaction report you're citing is rife with errors, mostly in logic and relevance. They make the mistake of assuming that all waste-to-energy technologies and facilities are the same, drawing connections between our proposed facility and other completely different facilities. That's why I wrote the first article in this storyline. If you're a chemical engineer, and you look at what I described, you'll reach the same conclusion as the Sacramento Municipal Air Quality Management District (they reviewed our reference design). In the workshop on January 15, they presented their conclusion: "no toxic emissions, but if you build it larger than a certain size, you'll need to get emissions credits for NOx (smog) and particulate matter". If you're willing to delve into the details, I think you'll find that there really are environmentally-responsible and financially-sound waste-to-energy processes available.
This was so SCANDALOSO!. I sure hope USST looks into something much more feasible and practical like solar energy, Sacramento could really use some REAL green jobs. It's this simple: using a 4,000 degree torch to burn garbage does not equal 'green', 'sustainable', 'renewable', 'clean', 'zero-emissions', or any of the other fraudulent claims made by USST.
PLEASE stop trying to greenwash our great City. I hope this is the last we hear of this failed, controversial, George Jetson theory to vaporize trash in a poor neighborhood. Here's some advice. Next time rather than trying to swindle a City with an environmental reputation, try building a small scale demonstration model in one of your fat cat investors backyards. I mean if its really as safe as you say, no one should mind the toxic emissions, right? Get it right and come back in like two decades when it can use it to power the Star Trek Enterprise.
Mean Joe Green
I think a project like USST is proposing is just what we, real Sacramentans, (not San Francisco activists) need to help our suffering economy, unstable public health, and to get rid of our title as the nation’s number one polluter as I’ve shamefully seen on planethazard.com - http://planethazard.com/phmapenv.aspx?mode=topten&area=national. In Sacramento, we have been so dependent on the old way of doing things with the companies and ideas that have only provided us with liabilities and deficits; it is time for a change!
Yet change can be difficult in an industry where the guys who bury our trash, harm our environment and cover it all up with recycling, are the same guys that pay these so-called "environmental groups" and our local "politicians"! We need real change, and we can only do this by "truly, cleanly" recycling the un-recyclable; I believe what USST is proposing is it, and by doing these kinds of projects and facilities it will only bring our community more opportunities, and bring innovation to this prehistoric industry. In addition, this is something we can count on; we can’t count on hoping that our markets (Asia) will purchase our recycled cans and boxes in order to preserve our planet; look what’s happening now, our months and months worth of recycling is days away from being buried in a Nevada landfill; by the way, do you think we’re going to get a rebate for our recycling fees? Either way, Asia throws half of the stuff we ship to them in our “not so environmentally-friendly” ships in their e-waste infected landfills anyway. Where are the environmental and social groups on this one?
The 21st century…and we're still burying waste. Are you serious? That is like throwing your dirty laundry under your bed, one way or another you’re going to find it and I can promise you that it will be much worse than it was when you put it there. All of this recycling, better packaging, and landfills are all just problems under the bed that will get worse unless we do something about them now. It’s interesting…we can send a man to the moon, land on time within a fraction of a second, but we can't keep our own planet clean? Or we just don't want to? Or is money more important?
I applaud these guys (USST) for taking the initiative and for bringing this to our city, I hope they are not embarrassed by the actions of our politicians and I hope that our city government will wake up and realize what we are losing. I would really like to have our city lead for once. I’m tired of having our community be the forefront of criminal activity, economical degradation, environmental humiliation, biased journalism, unstable bureaucracy and corrupted interest groups. I think our city needs to revisit USST’s project to help our community and our people get back into the respectable light we once were in.
Thank you for your posts David; I think this a great project!