The garbage as an energy source
The waste can be a source of clean energy? While in Naples is a patented technology that uses bacteria eating waste landfills in the United States in 2400 lend their waste for the production of clean energy. Sure, wind and solar renewable continue to be the most fascinating, but also wants to trash his part!
The technology that allows the conversion of waste into energy is now mature. In the United States, there are over 500 plants already active and just as many sites that expect to operate by converting energy installations made from waste gases into electricity.
A great energy-saving to the environment each year is having to store or dispose of tons of garbage, releasing CO2 and at the same time producing electricity by emitting CO2 and produce other articles intended to become trash!
The recovery of gas from landfills was actually already in 1975, to say this is Jean Bogner, Nobel Prize for Peace in 2007 and experienced geochemist at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Compared to the energy produced from biomass that Italy could bring in 16 billion Euros, the energy derived from municipal waste has a great advantage: there is already a good system of waste collection.
When we talk about ” The gas from landfills, ” we refer to the methane generated by the decomposition of organic material in municipal solid waste: food waste, garden waste, leaves, grasses, wood, paper … this gas in the U.S. is about one-quarter of the global anthropogenic emissions.
Not only, the U.S. but also in Germany there are treatment plants of waste so that Italy paid Germany for the export of our own waste, waste facility’s Germans transformed into energy.
The garbage should be re-evaluated, as well as the more classical works by recycling the waste has a large value in the energy sector. How to produce energy from waste?
The landfill gas is extracted by suction, which conveys the methane in a tube. Here the gas is oxidized during a combustion process that will produce carbon dioxide and water. With combustion, the gas will be used as a substitute for fossil fuels.
It is necessary that the gas produced by landfills is exploited for the production of energy might otherwise make big damage to the environment: methane has a high capacity to trap heat. This greenhouse gas warms the earth more than 23 times as much CO2 appointed. The gas, if collected, can feed a boiler or industrial setting in motion a turbine to generate electricity.
Use the gas to drive a turbine and generate electricity, could be a solution inconvenient because of the high costs, but do not forget that there are many cars to natural gas, therefore, this gas could undergo a process of compression or liquefaction to be used in vehicles or could be fed directly into a pipeline bringing gas to homes.
A limitation of the methane produced from waste is purity: the gas, if it is not treated, is full of impurities that make it less attractive to a mass market.
