Bury It Or Turn It Into Gold? If it’s Obvious, Then Why….
does Canada’s ‘centre of the Universe’ (Toronto), not do the obvious. For all the flapping of the mouth that people in Toronto do to try to make the rest of Canada and the World believe that they are the only forward thinking advanced community in Canada; you sure couldn’t tell it by how they have chosen to handle what they leave behind themselves each day.
This story document what can be done if your city is motivated to solve a problem and continues to work at a problem. See how the garden grows and the house stays lit and warm in this interesting story of using waste to create energy from methane and gasify wood waste.
City a model for waste disposal
Edmonton’s Waste Management Centre is Canada’s most sophisticated composting operation
Don Martin
Calgary Herald; CanWest News Service
Friday, October 06, 2006
EDMONTON – Starve a throw away society of landfill space and the desperation to dump triggers extreme measures.
Take Toronto. With most of its city dumps closed and surrounding communities refusing the task of trash-master, its garbage is mostly exported to a foreign country. A hundred gasoline-gulping rigs cross the Detroit River into Michigan every day, heading toward an ever-rising landmark of shame known to fed-up locals as Mount Trashmore.
Then there is the Edmonton extreme. Just outside the city limits it turns household waste into windrows of brown odourless compost it sells to the public. And if there is any doubt this made-in-Canada technology has turned trash green, consider that it mines enough methane gas from its rotting landfill to power the entire waste treatment plant and more, all the while negotiating with Europeans to sell lucrative greenhouse gas-reduction credits on the stock market.
Such is the contrast between environmental recklessness and responsibility. One city has created a North American border irritant to bury a problem nobody wants; the other has become a North American leader to resolve a problem by creating a benign product people actually buy.
The Edmonton Waste Management Centre is a six-year-old technological marvel created by the necessity of landfills nearing capacity in the late 1980s while facing a whole lot of not-in-my-backyard opposition to new sites.
By far, Canada’s largest and most sophisticated composting operation, it has extended the landfill’s lifespan by 20 years while attracting copycat interest from around the globe. Mongolian authorities, for instance, seem fascinated by the concept.
It has become so acclaimed that Grade 4 science students in the city examine it as part of their curriculum and about 11,000 students per year fill the lecture hall at the dump to learn how their trash makes gardens grow better.
Speaking of horticulture, staff proudly note there is a vegetable patch at the dump entrance cared for by volunteers using compost-enhanced soil to grow produce for the local food bank. And, they add, deer have been spotted drinking from the lagoon on site, which has been surrounded by native flora. It’s all a bit surreal when viewed through the lens of the traditional seagull-infested, olfactory-assaulting trash heap.
The $100-million Edmonton model is hardly rocket science, though. Which makes you wonder why it hasn’t become the standard instead of the exception.
The public put recyclables in a blue bag and the rest of their trash in another. Garbage trucks empty the regular waste onto the floor of a warehouse where workers, who no matter how much they are paid earn too little, sort through the smelly rows to remove obvious non-compostable material. Old shoes, bricks or car batteries, for instance.
The approved mess is then mixed with raw human sewage and injected into a giant rotating drum wide enough to handle passing school buses. Just two days later, moved along by the force of gravity as pathogens are killed off in the 60 C heat generated by this composting kickstart, a dark brown, flaky, bark-like substance showing a surprisingly advanced state of decomposition spills out the other end.
Much scientific filtering, oxidizing and stirring ensues — inside for one month, outdoors for another four months — before 125,000 tonnes of dirt additive per year is ready for sale to farmers, golf course operators and gardeners.
What has this got to do with clean air or climate change? Well, lots. Not only do you save truck exhaust from the nine-hour return trip to the United States for a one-minute cargo dump, but the city started “mining” its landfill for methane gas and CO2 emissions in the early 1990s, greenhouse gases that would otherwise have seeped into the atmosphere.
It drilled 70 wells 25 metres into the rotting heap and tapped into enough gas to power a generator with the capacity to light up 4,600 homes. And the captured carbon dioxide has handed the facility a greenhouse gas-emission credit of 60,000 tonnes per year, which Edmonton is now negotiating for sale on the fledging carbon market in Europe.
Plans are also under way to start gasifying scrap wood on site, which, if it works, would create even more energy gases and generate more emission credits while leaving just 10 per cent of the total waste stream bound for the landfill.
“There’s been a phenomenal shift in North American thinking in a very short period of time,” says Garry Spotowski, a former trash collector who now serves as the site’s educational co-ordinator. “Saving the environment is a hot topic. Composting has become a very important process in preventing pollution and using landfill methane to generate electricity almost completes the waste-disposal cycle.”
When it comes to living green in a chuck-it-out society, made-in-Edmonton compost beats a rotten mountain in Michigan on any garbage collection day.
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