With more and more Local Authorities worldwide, choosing to use Plasma Arc Gasification (PAG) in order to produce electricity from Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), is it time for everybody to start re-thinking the words we have always used to describe "leftovers" which we apparently have no further use for?
With these PAG plants able to safely and unobtrusively be sited on an average Industrial Estate, on the outskirts of town and produce, on average, sufficient electricity to power approximately 15,000 local homes (as well as heat for around 700 homes) surely the fuel it uses - MSW as well as hazardous & medical waste, old tyres, wood chips etc and not forgetting the millions of tonnes of fuel that can be mined from old, disused landfill sites, none of this surely can be considered to be anything other than a valuable and sustainable fuel.
When we further consider that a PAG plant will not produce Incinerator Bottom Ash (IBA), but rather a rock like material that is inert and classed under the relevant EU classification as Construction Industry Material, not waste, any plans to use Mass Burn Incinerators to dispose of waste (valuable fuel, remember!) seems very shortsighted.
As a PAG plant is not incineration as such, but rather the vaporisation and gasification, in an oxygen starved chamber operating at around 6,000 degrees celsius, of the materials fed into it, the IBA produced by mass burn incineration can, if needs be, be fed into it as part of the fuel, in turn reducing that IBA to the same inert, rock like building material!
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