September 25, 2013

Norway and Sweden want your garbage.

The rubbish is pre-sorted. Everything that can be recycled is meant to have been taken out, but even then they are still left with more than 300,000 tonnes a year.
They do not see it as waste here - they see it as energy.
"Four tonnes of waste has the same energy content as one tonne of fuel oil," says the director of the waste-to-energy agency in Oslo, Pal Mikkelsen.
"That means a lot of energy, and we use very little energy to transport it."
One tonne of fuel oil, Mr Mikkelsen says, could heat a house for half a year. In other words, take just part of an English bin lorry's maximum load picked up on the streets of Leeds or Bristol, turn it into energy here - and you can heat a home in Oslo for half a year.
The process is simple. The waste, tonne by tonne of it, is dropped into an incinerator. It soars to 850 degrees.
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Not everything is burned. Old tin cans and some mattress springs are left. At the end of the process they are left with ash, metal -which is recycled - and a lot of heat.
The heat boils water. The steam drives a turbine, which produces electricity. And the scalding water is piped off from the plant, to houses and public schools across Oslo.
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With tight controls to clean up the gases from the burning, Oslo believes converting waste into energy will help it to halve its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions within 20 years - making a city, whose wealth was built on oil, one of the greenest on the planet

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