Turning trash into Gold – How newer technologies are producing energy from garbage

The world is facing its biggest crisis apart from global warming in the form of waste management. Everywhere you go, there is garbage – tonnes and tonnes of it! From cities to landfills, to rivers and oceans – plastics and non-renewable sources of energy are wreaking havoc on the very existence of this planet by choking Mother Earth.

However, there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel after all! New technologies called Energy-from-Waste (EfW) or Waste-to-Energy (WTE) are being developed every day to harness the energy contained in waste material somehow repurpose them from waste into something meaningful. Basically, turning trash into gold!

In this article, we will showcase some of the latest EfW and WTE technologies in development that aim to solve the garbage crisis of the world:

Gasification

In this technique, residual plastic waste is burned with very little fuel and oxygen at 850°C with fuel or plasma beams to produce syngas and the resultant output can be used to generate electricity or heat. The byproducts can range from biofuels (landfill gas and sewage gas), hydrogen, methane, etc. which have various industrial applications.

Anaerobic digestion

This technique employs the use of millions of microorganisms that ‘eat-up’ wet organic waste and spew out methane-rich biogas that when combusted can generate heat and electricity or can be repurposed into biomethane or biofertilizer for agriculture.

Pyrolysis

This thermo-chemical incineration process heats up biomass in an oxygen-deficient environment inside a turbine to generate electricity and other products like carbon monoxide, char, olefin liquid, methane, and hydrogen.

In comparison to gasification or anaerobic digestion where partial oxidation of the waste occurs, pyrolysis achieves better output within a smaller processing container.

Benefits of such technologies

• Coal gasifiers have been in existence since a century, but the new breed of gasifiers are processing waste with a lower emissions profile and since they operate at a very low cost, they are being widely adopted across factories and hospitals to reclaim energy from waste.
• The gas and oil obtained from pyrolysis are being used to power turbines and industrial boilers thereby reducing the pressure on fossil fuels and natural char (charcoal).
• Countries (namely the UK, Sweden, Canada, etc.) which are adopting these technologies are significantly reducing their dependence on energy imports and meeting their renewable energy targets.

As a plus, they are reducing their carbon emissions and moving towards Electrical Vehicles (EVs) as an option to conventional automobiles.

• These technologies are more stable in controllable output or “baseload” power which means that their combustible power isn’t wasted if not being used whereas fossil fuels decay over time if not stored properly.
• These technologies produce close to zero greenhouse gases and also process waste which doesn’t end up into landfills and in turn saves us from polluted air, water, and soil.

If such technologies achieve mass adoption by high-waste producing countries like India, the waste management crisis we are going through can be solved easily. Sweden is a no-carbon emission nation because it uses all its waste to produce energy.

We hope more countries adopt these technologies to protect our Mother Earth from choking on plastic and effluent waste.