4 ms·

> Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in landfills, not the natural environment. Here in Sweden less than 0.5% of household waste goes to l

> Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in landfills, not the natural environment. Here in Sweden less than 0.5% of household waste goes to landfill. Almost everything is burned in co-generation plants for district heating, with pretty sophisticated exhaust gas treatment. Unfortunately most of the plastic waste that goes into the recycling bins also end up there in the end, with only about 10% currently being actually recycled (mostly it's PET that gets recycled, AFAIK). edit: My 10% figure is some years old; plastic numbers are actually much better now! These days it's about 35%. For glass, paper and metal the same figures are all around 80% though so plastic still has a long way to go.

wodenokoto 2y ago
I thought you guys sold it to Denmark. We love burning that stuff. Even put a recreational ski slope on top of one of our incineration plants!
sitkack 2y ago
So it goes into the sky instead? That seems more sightly, but the CO2 emissions must be astronomical.
- hmottestad 2y ago
  When it comes to plastics I like to think that it’s basically a product of oil and other oil related products are burnt all the time for energy. The end goal should include a carbon capture step. They’ve looked into that here in Oslo, Norway, but it ended up much costlier than anticipated and at the moment it looks like it’s going to be very very drawn out. Carbon capture at the source is usually not that terrible of an idea. Trying to capture carbon from the air around us is very challenging, but if the air is 80% CO2 to begin with it’s going to be much cheaper to capture half of it then trying to capture the same amount from regular air. I heard that a good way to capture carbon on a bigger scale would be through burning trees and capturing the carbon. Store the carbon in a concentrated form, use the heat to produce electricity and when you chop down trees to burn you also make space for growing new trees. Sounds kinda slow though, and not exactly cheap either.
  - TremendousJudge 2y ago
    What is "carbon capture" exactly? How does the mechanism work? Does it take an energy input?
    - hmottestad 2y ago
      I don’t know. You’ll probably have to do your own research.
  - ianburrell 2y ago
    If you want power, it is better to make renewables. The problem with carbon capture is that more energy and more fuel to run the capture. It costs too much. If you want to sequester the carbon, just cut down the trees and bury them. The problem is that there isn't enough trees on Earth to power civilization or sequester enough carbon.
    - hmottestad 2y ago
      It’s much better with renewables yes! In the freeze of the Oslo winter it’s a bit hard to capture enough sunlight to heat all the housing we have here. There’s not much wind either. We have a lot of hydroelectric power, but that’s very dependent on how much it rained in the autumn. We are also starting to build out wind power, but it’s slow going. We do import a lot of electricity from further south in Europe where there is more wind and solar. I would love to have solar on my roof. The legislation is super complicated though since I live in an apartment and we would basically have to create our own communal energy company. We would also have to pay taxes on the electricity we produce and use ourselves. It’s somewhat simpler for people that own a house, but I’m not quite rich enough to own a house in Oslo.
      - hmottestad 2y ago
        There is also an increasing demand for our renewable electricity in the industry and especially with the data centres that are being built because of our cheap electricity.
  - 2y ago
- renhanxue 2y ago
  If we didn't burn waste we'd need to burn something else to stay warm in winter. Currently we supplement the waste with _mostly_ renewables, like byproducts from the forestry industry (e.g. treetops, wood chips, sawdust) and the olive oil industry (olive pits; we import this stuff from the Mediterranean region), but we burn a bit of peat too because there aren't enough reasonably priced renewables. Burning waste really isn't meaningfully worse than burning anything else. After the combustion we're left with 15-20% by weight in slag; some of this is metal that is recovered and sent to recycling, but the rest is effectively gravel that is used in e.g. road construction and the like. There's also 3-5% by weight of toxic gases captured by the exhaust gas treatment. This is sent to a special facility in Norway that more or less puts it in landfill, although a very carefully managed one.
  - yreg 2y ago
    > If we didn't burn waste we'd need to burn something else to stay warm in winter. Why not nuclear/renewables?
    - renhanxue 2y ago
      Nuclear was a thing in the 50's/60's but district heating isn't practical over long distances and nobody wanted nuclear plants in their suburbs. Renewables we already do burn quite a bit of. But really, quite a lot of household waste is actually renewable too - cardboard packaging, food scraps that didn't end up in the compost, such things. So it's really not that bad. Waste accounts for about 20% of the total energy required for heating in Sweden.
      - yreg 2y ago
        I meant what's impossible about making electricity from nuclear/renewable sources and then powering electric heaters with that electricity?
        eru 2y ago
        You'd want to power heat pumps. Electric heaters get you 100% efficiency. Heat pumps get you 400%+ efficiency.
leoedin 2y ago
What’s completely crazy about that is that there’s people spending serious money trying to build carbon sequestration systems while other people are turning an inert and stable form of carbon back into carbon dioxide in the name of sustainability.
- renhanxue 2y ago
  Would you rather we'd burn peat (which is also sequestered carbon) instead? Because that's what we used to do. We need to stay warm in winter one way or another. In the 1950's we thought that in the future we'd have nuclear cogeneration plants. There was one such plant (Ågesta) in commercial operation, but it closed in the mid 1970's. edit: also, to your point about sequestration: it's in actual and literal fact the same people. The Stockholm municipal energy company burns a lot of waste (and also woodchips and other renewables) for district heating. That same company also recently closed a big carbon sequestration deal with Microsoft: https://carboncredits.com/microsoft-and-stockholm-exergi-strike-historic-deal-for-3-33-mts-of-carbon-removal/ https://carboncredits.com/microsoft-and-stockholm-exergi-str....
  - MostlyStable 2y ago
    Hopefully in the relatively near future, heat storage systems (like the sand batteries talked about in [0]) can do long term storage of heat energy from renewables and heating can provided relatively carbon free through the winter. For now though, I'd agree that the burning is not that big a deal. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZrM-IZlTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZrM-IZlTE
    - mrmlz 2y ago
      We got that as well in Sweden - but we use water. Its part of the central-communal heating system that heats a large of the city.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    I'd prefer you use wind to get the energy(or solar but there isn't much sun when you need heat) and burn nothing.

wodenokoto 2y ago

I thought you guys sold it to Denmark. We love burning that stuff. Even put a recreational ski slope on top of one of our incineration plants!

sitkack 2y ago

So it goes into the sky instead? That seems more sightly, but the CO2 emissions must be astronomical.

hmottestad 2y ago
When it comes to plastics I like to think that it’s basically a product of oil and other oil related products are burnt all the time for energy. The end goal should include a carbon capture step. They’ve looked into that here in Oslo, Norway, but it ended up much costlier than anticipated and at the moment it looks like it’s going to be very very drawn out. Carbon capture at the source is usually not that terrible of an idea. Trying to capture carbon from the air around us is very challenging, but if the air is 80% CO2 to begin with it’s going to be much cheaper to capture half of it then trying to capture the same amount from regular air. I heard that a good way to capture carbon on a bigger scale would be through burning trees and capturing the carbon. Store the carbon in a concentrated form, use the heat to produce electricity and when you chop down trees to burn you also make space for growing new trees. Sounds kinda slow though, and not exactly cheap either.
- TremendousJudge 2y ago
  What is "carbon capture" exactly? How does the mechanism work? Does it take an energy input?
  - hmottestad 2y ago
    I don’t know. You’ll probably have to do your own research.
- ianburrell 2y ago
  If you want power, it is better to make renewables. The problem with carbon capture is that more energy and more fuel to run the capture. It costs too much. If you want to sequester the carbon, just cut down the trees and bury them. The problem is that there isn't enough trees on Earth to power civilization or sequester enough carbon.
  - hmottestad 2y ago
    It’s much better with renewables yes! In the freeze of the Oslo winter it’s a bit hard to capture enough sunlight to heat all the housing we have here. There’s not much wind either. We have a lot of hydroelectric power, but that’s very dependent on how much it rained in the autumn. We are also starting to build out wind power, but it’s slow going. We do import a lot of electricity from further south in Europe where there is more wind and solar. I would love to have solar on my roof. The legislation is super complicated though since I live in an apartment and we would basically have to create our own communal energy company. We would also have to pay taxes on the electricity we produce and use ourselves. It’s somewhat simpler for people that own a house, but I’m not quite rich enough to own a house in Oslo.
    - hmottestad 2y ago
      There is also an increasing demand for our renewable electricity in the industry and especially with the data centres that are being built because of our cheap electricity.
- 2y ago
renhanxue 2y ago
If we didn't burn waste we'd need to burn something else to stay warm in winter. Currently we supplement the waste with _mostly_ renewables, like byproducts from the forestry industry (e.g. treetops, wood chips, sawdust) and the olive oil industry (olive pits; we import this stuff from the Mediterranean region), but we burn a bit of peat too because there aren't enough reasonably priced renewables. Burning waste really isn't meaningfully worse than burning anything else. After the combustion we're left with 15-20% by weight in slag; some of this is metal that is recovered and sent to recycling, but the rest is effectively gravel that is used in e.g. road construction and the like. There's also 3-5% by weight of toxic gases captured by the exhaust gas treatment. This is sent to a special facility in Norway that more or less puts it in landfill, although a very carefully managed one.
- yreg 2y ago
  > If we didn't burn waste we'd need to burn something else to stay warm in winter. Why not nuclear/renewables?
  - renhanxue 2y ago
    Nuclear was a thing in the 50's/60's but district heating isn't practical over long distances and nobody wanted nuclear plants in their suburbs. Renewables we already do burn quite a bit of. But really, quite a lot of household waste is actually renewable too - cardboard packaging, food scraps that didn't end up in the compost, such things. So it's really not that bad. Waste accounts for about 20% of the total energy required for heating in Sweden.
    - yreg 2y ago
      I meant what's impossible about making electricity from nuclear/renewable sources and then powering electric heaters with that electricity?
      - eru 2y ago
        You'd want to power heat pumps. Electric heaters get you 100% efficiency. Heat pumps get you 400%+ efficiency.

leoedin 2y ago

What’s completely crazy about that is that there’s people spending serious money trying to build carbon sequestration systems while other people are turning an inert and stable form of carbon back into carbon dioxide in the name of sustainability.

renhanxue 2y ago
Would you rather we'd burn peat (which is also sequestered carbon) instead? Because that's what we used to do. We need to stay warm in winter one way or another. In the 1950's we thought that in the future we'd have nuclear cogeneration plants. There was one such plant (Ågesta) in commercial operation, but it closed in the mid 1970's. edit: also, to your point about sequestration: it's in actual and literal fact the same people. The Stockholm municipal energy company burns a lot of waste (and also woodchips and other renewables) for district heating. That same company also recently closed a big carbon sequestration deal with Microsoft: https://carboncredits.com/microsoft-and-stockholm-exergi-strike-historic-deal-for-3-33-mts-of-carbon-removal/ https://carboncredits.com/microsoft-and-stockholm-exergi-str....
- MostlyStable 2y ago
  Hopefully in the relatively near future, heat storage systems (like the sand batteries talked about in [0]) can do long term storage of heat energy from renewables and heating can provided relatively carbon free through the winter. For now though, I'd agree that the burning is not that big a deal. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZrM-IZlTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZrM-IZlTE
  - mrmlz 2y ago
    We got that as well in Sweden - but we use water. Its part of the central-communal heating system that heats a large of the city.
- bluGill 2y ago
  I'd prefer you use wind to get the energy(or solar but there isn't much sun when you need heat) and burn nothing.