On 25 Dec 2007 17:45:29 GMT, Jim Yanik wrote:

Kurt Ullman wrote in
:

In article ,
"JoeSpareBedroom" wrote:

Why do people recycle containers & paper when it would be so much
easier to just throw the stuff into the regular trash?

Because it is free where it is successful?


OTOH,why don't they just process the "regular trash" and separate
recyclables from it,burn the rest for electric and steam generation?
What's left is much smaller and less apt to damage ground water or spread
pollution.

Akron, OH had a trash burning power plant 10-15 years ago. It was
state of the art at the time, but ran into numerous problems,
including explosions resulting from chance mixtures of "stuff" in the
waste stream, constantly exceeding air pollution regulations due to
burning of toxic materials in the waste stream that were not practical
(at least then) to identify and separate, and having to treat all the
remnants from the burning process as hazardous waste because of very
high heavy metal and toxics concentrations. Yes, there was less
material to dispose of, but what remained was very nasty. They
finally shut it down. Maybe technology has advanced now, but
separating a high volume solid waste stream into stuff that is OK to
burn and stuff that isn't OK to burn is a hard problem. Especially
when you consider that materials that by themselves may be OK to burn,
may *not* be OK to burn when combined with other materials.

What might be more practical is more point of origin waste burning
power generation, such as is done at sawmills. When you know with
some degree of certainty what's in the waste stream, it's a lot easier
to burn it without problems. Burn the stuff that can be safely burned
before it gets mixed in with stuff that can't or shouldn't be burned.
Of course, that might work for industrial situations, but it's
probably not practical for co-mingled household waste streams.

Paul F.