Biomass and Incineration – Page 2

Hartford trash-to-energy plant plans to ship waste out of state, scrapping renovation effort over lack of funding

Courant discusses how a Hartford. CT, trash-to-energy plant plans to ship waste out of state, scrapping renovation effort over lack of funding.

The regional trash-to-energy and recycling plant in Hartford’s South Meadows is abandoning its effort to renovate the aging facility, with officials of the quasi-state system saying a desperate lack of state funding is now forcing a return to trucking garbage out of state.

At a special meeting Thursday, the board of directors for the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority unanimously agreed to move on from a $333 million proposed plan to modernize and upgrade the old trash-incinerating plant and instead convert it into a transfer station.

“It’s a travesty,” Richard Barlow, vice chairman of the board of directors, said before the body’s vote. “It’s a great disappointment to me to be in the position where that is the only alternative.”

In California, A Push Grows to Turn Dead Trees into Biomass Energy

Yale Environment 360 discusses how, in California, A Push Grows to Turn Dead Trees into Biomass Energy. As forests in California and the Western U.S. are hit by rising numbers of fires and disease outbreaks related to climate change, some experts argue that using dead and diseased trees to produce biomass energy will help to restore forests and reduce CO2 emissions.

onathan Kusel owns three pickups and a 45-foot truck for hauling woodchip bins. He operates a woodchip yard and a 35-kilowatt biomass plant that burns dead trees, and he runs a crew marking trees for loggers working in national forests. Those are a lot of blue-collar credentials for a University of California, Berkeley PhD sociologist known for his documentation of how the decline of the timber industry affects rural communities.

What drove Kusel into a side business — logging small and dead trees and burning them in biomass boilers — is fear of fire. In 2007, the 65,000-acre Moonlight Fire blew flaming embers onto his lawn near Taylorsville, California as he readied his family to evacuate. Last September, the Walker Fire scorched 54,614 acres just up the valley from the offices of the Sierra Institute for Community and Environment, the nonprofit research organization Kusel founded in 1993. In that 12-year span, wildfires burned 690 square miles in the northern Sierra Nevada.

Walmart blasts Virginia regulator’s report on pricing, biomass in Dominion’s proposed 100% renewable energy tariff

Utility Dive discusses Walmart’s reaction to a Virginia regulator’s report on pricing, biomass in Dominion’s proposed 100% renewable energy tariff.

Walmart, one of Dominion Energy’s largest customers in Virginia, warned regulators that their consideration of the utility’s plan to offer a 100% renewable energy option to C&I and residential customers includes unreasonable pricing, according to a Monday filing.
An April report from Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC) hearing examiner Mary Beth Adams recommended approving Dominion’s proposed tariff. The utility largely approves of Adams’s recommendations and wants to see the tariff approved quickly, to prevent customers from leaving its service.
Walmart, alongside renewable energy advocates, said the premium would be paid for an inferior product, as it would include “energy that most customers do not consider to be renewable,” such as co-fired coal and biomass units. The company has long-opposed the tariff but noted a litany of oversights in the net-positive report from Adams.

El Dorado plant destroying virus waste

Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette (nwaonline) discusses how an El Dorado hazardous waste plant is destroying virus waste.

A hazardous-waste facility in El Dorado is incinerating hundreds of containers full of infectious waste per week produced during the coronavirus testing and decontamination efforts taking place in the mid-Atlantic region and neighboring Southern states.

The facility, owned by the national environmental services company Clean Harbors, recently requested a temporary waiver from the Arkansas Division of Environmental Quality to expedite the incineration process for covid-19 waste during the outbreak. The agency granted the request April 14.

The temporary authorization is one of a number of requests submitted to the agency and the Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment in recent weeks seeking regulatory relief during the crisis.

Like federal environmental regulators, earlier this month the state agency issued provisional guidance relaxing testing, permitting and enforcement for regulated entities such as landfills, utility companies and manufacturing plants on a case-by-case basis if the operators of these facilities believe they cannot comply with regulations because of the outbreak.

Michael Moore’s new movie is BS – 2 articles

Bill McKibben, in Rolling Stone, discusses how Michael Moore is damaging our most important goal – stopping climate change. It discusses Moore’s personal attack on McKibben’s science.

The Guardian discusses the falsehoods in the movie and how the ultra right wing world now loves him.

Report: Incinerators may spread, not break down PFAS

CEN.acs.org discusses a report showing that incinerators may spread, not break down PFAS. Preliminary data show soil and water near New York facility are contaminated.

New data suggest that commercial incineration of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) doesn’t break down these hardy chemicals. Instead, it spreads them into surrounding areas.

Soil and surface water near an incinerator in Cohoes, New York, that has burned firefighting foam containing PFAS are tainted with these persistent substances, preliminary data released April 27 by Bennington College show.

In early March, a team of professors and students from the Vermont college traveled about 50 km (31 miles) from their campus to Cohoes, where they collected soil and surface water samples near the incinerator. A commercial laboratory analyzed the samples for the presence of PFAS.

TOXIC PFAS FALLOUT FOUND NEAR INCINERATOR IN UPSTATE NEW YORK

The Intercept discusses how toxic PFAS fallout has been found near an upstate NY incinerator.

INDUSTRIAL CHEMICALS known as PFAS have contaminated soil and water near an incinerator in upstate New York that has been burning firefighting foam. The facility is run by Norlite, whose parent company Tradebe contracted with the Department of Defense to burn the foam known as AFFF, as The Intercept reported in January 2019.

The analysis of three soil and four water samples collected near the Norlite incinerator in Cohoes, New York, which appears to be the first environmental testing done near an AFFF incineration site, revealed the presence of 10 PFAS compounds that have been associated with the foam. The levels of the chemicals in soil and water declined with distance from the plant, and measurements of PFOS, a compound that has been widely used in firefighting foam, were twice as high downwind from the facility than upwind of it, according to David Bond, a professor of environmental studies at Bennington College, who conducted the testing with some of his students.

Could Our Energy Come from Giant Seaweed Farms in the Ocean?

Scientific American discusses whether we can generate electricity from seaweed farms in the ocean. A U.S. agency is funding projects to help create a bioenergy industry based on macroalgae.

One day in the future, the Pacific Ocean could be home to kilometers of seaweed farms tended by submarine drones and waiting to be turned into fuel. This is the vision of Marine BioEnergy, a start-up backed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E). The U.S. government agency is funding the company, along with a handful of related projects, because it views the open ocean as a largely untapped resource for a new and potentially better source of renewable bioenergy.

About 5 percent of total U.S. energy use currently comes from biomass such as corn and wood, which are renewable and absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis as they grow. Many experts expect this percentage to continue rising, largely because of bioenergy’s flexibility. It can, for instance, supply fuel to aviation and other forms of transportation that are hard to electrify. To achieve major decarbonization of the U.S. economy, many analyses suggest bioenergy will need to make up 20 to 25 percent of the country’s energy sources, says Marc von Keitz, a program director at ARPA-E.

Study: Kids exposed to indoor pollution from burning of solid biomass fuel have lower IQ

Hindustan Times discusses a study showing that kids exposed to indoor pollution from burning of solid biomass fuel have lower IQ. The study was conducted by a team of medical professors and doctors from the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) in Chandigarh. The team analyzed how household air pollution was taking a toll on children’s cognitive function, particularly of those who were exposed to such pollution during the first three years of their lives.

Children who are exposed to indoor air pollution triggered by burning of solid biomass fuel such as cow-dung and wood may be suffering from lower Intelligence Quotient (IQ) levels, a new study has indicated.

The study was conducted by a team of medical professors and doctors from the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) in Chandigarh. The team analyzed how household air pollution was taking a toll on children’s cognitive function, particularly of those who were exposed to such household air pollution during the first three years of their lives at a stretch.

The findings of the study appeared in the March 2020 issue of Science of the Total Environment published by Elsevier. [No link provided.]

INSIGHT: Burning Garbage Is No Part of a Cleaner Future

This Bloomberg Environment article discusses why burning garbage is no part of a cleaner future. A recent House proposal says burning municipal waste is a form of clean energy, but Roger Ballentine, president of Green Strategies, begs to differ. He says burning trash isn’t a way to get to net zero energy and hurts the already declining recycling industry.

A key plank of the CLEAN Future Act proposal, introduced in January by House Democrats, is achieving “net-zero emissions from the electricity sector” through the use of a Clean Energy Standard (CES), which Democrats will likely pass this year ahead of the election.

The CES would require retail electricity suppliers to obtain 100% of their electricity from “clean energy sources” by 2050. That is the right way to go.

However, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, burning municipal solid waste (MSW) emits nearly as much CO2 per unit of energy as coal—and almost twice as much as burning natural gas. This is not the way to get to net-zero.

The European Commission announced in December 2019 a new classification system to guide the growing number of private and public capital investors who want to put capital to work in ways that will not only generate strong returns, but will also have a positive environmental impact.