At least one company has developed technology to convert garbage to energy on a smaller scale. IST Energy’s Green Energy Machine (GEM) is an affordable trash-to-energy conversion system suitable for operations such as office complexes, hotels, malls, restaurants, college/university campuses.

Priced at $850,000 USD, GEM converts up to 3 tons per day of consumer and industrial trash — paper, wood, plastic, food, agricultural waste — into usable electric energy. According to the company, the GEM system uses only 10% of the energy that it produces. It generates 40 kWe of electricity and 187 kWth of heat per day.

Aside from the huge benefit of waste elimination, the heat and energy production could dramatically reduce energy bills, especially in cold environments like Canada. According to the company, these cost reductions should pay for the initial investment in 3 to 4 years.

Although the GEM system does emit CO2, when compared to traditional landfill waste disposal, there is a large net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. With new, more aggressive CO2 reductions targets for many governments, this technology could be an easy fix to reduce some of the pressure they face.

A brief part of the film, near the beginning, discussed the presence of atrazine in water. Especially in North America, where it is used as herbicide on corn farms, and travels up to 6000km via rain. Because it causes prostate and breast cancer, and has destructive environmental effects such as chemically castrating fish and amphibians, it’s use is banned in Europe. However, it is still widely used in the USA and in Canada.

According to the film, there is less regulation of bottled water than there is for tap water. Independent testing of over a thousand bottles and hundreds of brands of bottled water revealed high levels arsenic, organic chemicals, and bacteria. Just because there is a photo of a mountain stream on the label doesn’t mean that it wasn’t pumped out of an industrial parking lot!

The film is not all doom and gloom, though. It highlights progress by several communities banning together to implement new technologies or old traditions to create sustainable water management in their area. The film’s website is also the central part of a social movement to have the right to clean water declared as a basic human right by the United Nations:

Article 31:
Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance.

I signed the petition today. You should too.

I wrote about the Trash Gas project in Florida two years ago, and it seems that the story has resurfaced in the mainstream media today. It looks like the Florida project has been scaled down to half of the reported capacity in 2006. Back then, the plant was to eliminate 3000 tons of trash per day, and send 120MW back to the grid. Today’s report is 1500 tons and 60MW, to be ready by 2011.

Meanwhile, here in Canada, Plasco Energy Group setup a somewhat similar plant that has been successfully operating in Ottawa for about a year, and has projects underway for several other cities, including Vancouver and Los Angeles. Several plasma plants are operating in Japan, according to the Wikipedia article on the technology. The article mentions that a couple of plants in Europe were shut down over emissions problems.

The emissions produced by the plant in Ottawa are closely monitored, and so far, the results are quite good. It is my hope that Plasco is successful in their Vancouver and L.A. bids, and that this technology proliferates. As time goes on we will figure out better ways of capturing or converting the emissions. Anyone who has seen the current method of waste disposal — landfill sites — should be on-board with plasma arc plants as well. Dumping garbage on the ground isn’t really “disposal” at all, it’s just moving it to a different place, where some of it rots and produces greenhouse gasses and a vile stench. The rest of it, plastics and the like, simply sit there, polluting the ground water and poisoning wildlife. Plasma gasification isn’t perfect, yet, but it’s a huge step in the right direction.

Resources produced per ton of waste by the Plasco Conversion System