Sunday, October 08, 2017

"The rest of the world."

It is vital First World countries find definitive solutions to waste and the containment of greenhouse gases. There is no saying no to that reality. This is a task that cannot fail.

The BRIC countries need to prove they can be world leaders and take on the challenges to pollution, especially greenhouse gases.

The Third World, which some of it is in the southern USA, is always given a pass on the issue of pollution. These countries need to be mentored into leadership that will provide pride for their people to accomplish something the USA is too lazy and greedy to accomplish; the elimination of GHGs in producing energy for their country. 

There is no excuse. Every country has to achieve a pollution free environment that protects air and water quality and also protects the troposphere. The issue of the Climate Crisis belongs to everyone.

Next week Hazardous Waste.






When it comes to making decisions that impact the climate, it is the OUTCOME that has to be met; if profit happens it is a side effect.

India:

September 25, 2017

Chennai: Greater Chennai Corporation's (click here) proposed solid waste management revamp plan will pollute the city less as the civic body has decided to make biomethanation a key link - apart from incinerator units - in the waste collection-treatment-disposal chain.


Alterations will be made to packages three and four of the civic body's four-part (each called a package) 1,442-crore solid waste management revamp plan, which TOI reported in June. According to the initial proposal, the city's landfill sites at Perungudi and Kodungaiyur would be shut and, in its place, the civic body would set up two waste-to-energy incinerator plants.



During a stakeholder's meet held in July, residents disapproved of the corporation's plan to prioritise investment in incineration units at the expense of bio-methanation and composting plants. Subsequently, the civic body's technical review committee, chaired by the special officer and commissioner D Karthikeyan, met and discussed the feedback received from residents....

Vietnam:

September 25, 2017

About 6,000 tons of solid waste (click here) is produced daily in Hanoi, 95 percent of which is buried, according to the city’s construction department.

Hanoi authorities have called on enterprises to invest in technologies to treat and recycle waste to turn waste into useful materials. 

Nguyen Phuc Thanh, general director of Enserco, said his company has a patent for technology to treat domestic waste by burning with heat recovery.

The technology reduces waste treatment costs as it uses less supporting fuel because it removes garbage components that cannot be burned and dries garbage to reduce humidity before burning. 

During the waste burning process, the heat from the incinerator emissions is used to dry garbage and heat the air provided to the incinerator. When sorting and drying garbage, workers use equipment to collect gas in the incinerator in order to reduce the discharge of bad odors into the environment.

Enserco’s waste treatment plant in Son Tay can treat 700 tons of waste a day.
Whoever thought industrial codes are listed with the "US Census Bureau." It makes sense as a place to consolidate information about the country, but, it wasn't my first thought.

Use the following industry codes (click here) (BOLD numbers in the shaded columns), when asked, to complete the following questionnaire. The North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) codes are listed for reference only.

Each one of those codes will result in understanding the stream of industrial waste facing the USA.


October 6, 2017
By Susan Mustapich

Rockport - 
More than 20 bales of mixed plastic stored (click here) at the Midcoast Waste Transfer Station in Rockport may be trucked to an incinerator unless a market is found for the material.

The mixed plastics in the bales at MCSW is made up of colored and clear plastic found in food containers and packaging, stamped with the numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Number 2 plastic, commonly used for milk and laundry detergent containers, is still sold for a profit. It is separated into natural and colored, which command different prices on the market.

At a Sept. 27 meeting, the MCSW board of directors gave the go ahead for disposal by incineration of the accumulated bales of mixed plastic. Interim Manager Beth Kwiatkowski said Sept. 28 she is researching options for trucking and disposal, while continuing to look for someone to recycle the material.

Kwiatkowksi, who is interim manager while Jim Guerra is on medical leave, said MCSW will have to pay for the materials to be removed from the transfer station, whether the bales are trucked out for disposal or for recycling, because buyers are no longer paying for mixed plastics. She is looking for the most cost-efficient choice. Trucking out recyclables, even when buyers are not paying, generally costs less than trucking out trash.

While prices for recyclables fluctuate, and are influenced by a global market, MCSW transfer station usually earns money for most of its recyclables. Natural (uncolored) number two plastic earns about $600 per ton, colored number two plastic earns $300 per ton, and cans, cardboard and paper continue to earn revenue, according to Kwiatkowski....                             

Industrial incinerators are always controversial and rightfully so, they can effect human health.

"Helios Incinerator System for Industrial Solid Waste" (click here)

Stepped Hearth incinerators (click here) have multiple hearths in cascading steps.  Waste is loaded by a ram feeder and begins combustion on the first level.  As new waste is loaded on the first level, it pushes partially burned waste to the next lower step or level.  A tumbling action results, exposing more surface to the combustion chamber and ensuring more complete destruction of the waste.
Each successive charge moves waste to the next lower level.  Automatic de-ashing systems can be used to remove the ash without needing the system to cool, so true continuous operation can be achieved.


Due to the methane content of landfills and the ever increasing need for landfill lands, the incinerator takes shape as an important process to handle solid industrial waste.

The stepped hearth incinerator has several burning chambers, whereby one is hotter than the next in exposing surface area in tumbling and prolonging the burning process to completion of all solid waste. 

Both the ash and the emissions of greenhouse gases into the troposphere is an issue. The question regarding the incineration of waste to produce energy is, will the offset of producing CO2 rather than methane in landfills be better in the long view to the troposphere and reducing anthropogenic footprint of Earth's physics.

The technology to capture CO2 from these processes are taking shape. The most innovative currently is in the Netherlands.

Patrick Huttenhuis, Andy Roeloffzenb , Geert Versteega. CO2 capture and reuse at a waste incinerator. Energy Procedia 86 ( 2016 ) 47 – 55

Twence is a waste processing and energy generation company (click here) located in the eastern part of the Netherlands. In the Twence plant waste is incinerated and in this process the waste is converted to valuable products like heat and power. In the flue gas produced from this Waste-To-Energy (WTE) plant a significant amount of CO2 is released to the atmosphere. Recently a new innovative process developed by Procede Gas Treating B.V. has been commissioned at line 3 of the Twence plant. In this process CO2 emitted to atmosphere, is scrubbed from the flue gas and this CO2 is used for mineralization. The CO2 is converted in an innovative new reactor configuration from sodium carbonate directly to sodium bicarbonate (SBC). The produced SBC slurry will directly be used at the WTE plant to purify the flue gas stream, before it is released to atmosphere. Due to the implementation of this process, which is unique in the world, the carbon footprint of the Twence installation is reduced. The new SBC plant produces 8,000 tons of sodium bicarbonate annually and to produce this amount of SBC 2,000 ton per year CO2 is captured from the flue gas.

Another venture in Norway seeks to deposit captured CO2 into the deep ocean where it will ultimately form hydrates. They also see CO2 capture as a method to bring oil and gas out of wells that have become low in gas pressure.

While these efforts by many countries pursuing carbon capture may prove to be only a temporary solution. The upper oceans are known to be melting methane hydrates. If that is the case the deep ocean can be an answer, but, in order to deposit the gas in the deep ocean, the gas has to remain either gaseous or liquid until the delivery point.

"Gas hydrates for deep ocean storage of CO2" (click here)

As long as it doesn't set off a geiger counter, it has promise.

October 4, 2017
By Dave Flaherty

A Mississauga-based company (click here) is interested in coming to the region, claiming it can take bottom ash from the Durham York Energy Centre and convert it into materials such as stone and asphalt.
Don Constable, president and CEO of Greenpath Eco Inc. spoke at a recent meeting of region’s Energy From Waste-Waste Management committee.
According to Constable, his company converts bottom ash, a material discharged from solid waste incinerators such as those at the DYEC, into materials such as concrete, aggregate, and hot mix asphalt.
Constable said the material his company produces is the same strength as regular concrete but hardens faster, does not crack or shrink, and is better suited to face Canada’s harsh winters.
Greenpath Eco Inc. has been testing its product since 2008, and since 2012, has been taking bottom ash from the Region of Peel’s solid waste incinerator in Brampton....

From a previous article:


To the left is the ? technology ? of mountaintop mining. Dynamite. Really?

Coal mining is a messy business. In parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia, mining companies often get at underground coal seams by blowing up the tops of mountains — a process known as mountaintop removal mining. Once that’s done, they’ll dump the debris into the valleys below, which can contaminate streams and waterways with toxic heavy metals.

Appalachian Voices, (click here) an environmental group, estimates that coal companies have buried over 2,000 miles of streams in the region through mountaintop removal mining since the 1990s. And there’s growing evidence that when mining debris and waste gets into water supplies, the toxic metals can have dire health impacts for the people and mostly rural communities living nearby.

The toxic metals found in streams is not necessarily from the coal so much as the land being dumped into the water. The practice is ridiculous in the year 2017. Coal mining was something my grandfathers did for work. The mining technologies has replaced the 'human being' as coal miners. There are a few ten thousand miners left in the USA as technology replaced them.

These companies never bothered to realize the future of energy would look different, instead, they paid off politicians to prevent the future from arriving. The most hideous example of that is Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He is a US Senator from Kentucky. He touts he is keeping the coal mining industry alive for those patriot coal miners in his state. Lies, lies and more lies.

...As anyone living in the coalfields knows, (click here) coal production and employment in eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia follow boom and bust cycles. But starting in the early 1980s, the close link between production and employment changed as mechanization and explosives replaced mine workers. Since then, coal production in Kentucky has declined by about 19% while employment has dropped by 62%....

By allowing toxic and radioactive pollution in our streams, does anyone believe that will bring back jobs? No. The "Age of the Coal Machine" is well underway and there is no future in allowing dumping all over again.

"Kentucky Quarterly Coal Report," (click here) the dinosaur is taking it's last breaths. The increase in Western Kentucky production is a whopping 0.2 percent. OMG. There is no future for this form of energy. 

Consumer based pollution of GHG has to come under control. The population increases can remove advancements in science.

October 8, 2017
By Paul Rosenberg

The Zero Waste International Alliance (click heredefines its goal as “ethical, economical, efficient and visionary," and also as a way to "guide people in changing their lifestyles and practices to emulate sustainable natural cycles, where all discarded materials are designed to become resources for others to use.”
If it sounds utopian, well, it is. It's a goal, after all. But 11 years after Los Angeles first adopted the “zero waste” framework, the city has put in place a sweeping new waste-management system, Recycle LA, that's guided by the zero-waste philosophy in the abstract, but is also fleshed out in ways that meet a wide range of more immediate goals, where progress — or lack thereof — can be measured, compared and tracked against expectations.
Translating the abstract into a nuts-and-bolts plan was largely the world of a wide-ranging coalition called Don't Waste LA, pulled together by the LA Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) in the late 2000s.
At the time, Hillary Gordon was chair of the Zero Waste Committee at the Los Angeles Chapter the Sierra Club. “A lot of zero waste work up until this point had been at the level of 'what can people do individually in their lives to take responsibility for the waste they are generating?'” she recalled in a recent interview....

And teachers are buying their own school supplies.



October 6, 2017
By Brady Dennis

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (click here) inspector general acknowledged plans Friday to expand its inquiry into Administrator Scott Pruitt’s travel habits, marking the latest Trump Cabinet member to face scrutiny from his own agency for taxpayer-funded trips.

The move came after recent disclosures that Pruitt had taken at least four noncommercial and military flights since mid-February, costing taxpayers more than $58,000 to fly him to various parts of the country, according to records provided to a congressional oversight committee and obtained by The Washington Post.

The EPA inspector general’s office announced in August that it had opened an inquiry into Pruitt’s frequent travel to his home state of Oklahoma. The internal watchdog at the time said its investigation was triggered by “congressional requests and a hotline complaint, all of which expressed concerns about Administrator Pruitt’s travel — primarily his frequent travel to and from his home state of Oklahoma at taxpayer expense.”...         

EPA's Guide for Industrial Waste Management

One aspect to governance the American people are unaware of is the leadership role the government takes in compliance.

There are issues with the EPA labeled, "Not Attainable." That is a designation for companies that have applied technology or not because of expense that simply can't reach compliance to federal standards on their own. For some states "Not Attainable" is the end product of it's governance, however, that is not suppose to be the end product.

The end product is suppose to be a collaboration of government and the company involved to find answers and reach attainment. Where even some of the best technology won't improve a companies pollution levels, there needs assessment of the need for the companies products, including electricity generation, and finding a better method that will bring compliance.

When President Obama moved forward with limits on Greenhouse Gas Emissions it caused the demolition of old coal fired electricity plants. These plants were extremely old and should have been demolished a decade or more ago. The best governance is sometimes removing old infrastructure and replacing it with better answers.

It is my point of view that when old infrastructure exceeds it's life span, there is a strong need to move forward with modernization. When the tax deduction for depreciation of a building reaches it's last year; an assessment for it's continued use is needed.

What Are the Underlying Principles of the Guide? (click here)

When using the Guide for Industrial Waste Management, please keep in mind that it reflects four underlying principles: 

Protecting human health and the environment. The purpose of the Guide is to promote sound waste management that protects human health and the environment. It takes a multi-media approach that emphasizes surface-water, ground-water, and air protection, and presents a comprehensive framework of technologies and practices that make up an effective waste management system. 

Tailoring management practices to risks. There is enormous diversity in the type and nature of industrial waste and the environmental settings in which it is managed. The Guide provides conservative management recommendations and simple-to-use modeling tools to tailor management practices to waste- and location-specific risks. It also identifies in-depth analytic tools to conduct more comprehensive site-specific analyses. 

Affirming state and tribal leadership. States, tribes, and some local governments have primary responsibility for adopting and implementing programs to ensure proper management of industrial waste. This Guide can help states, tribes, and local governments in carrying out those programs. Individual states or tribes might have more stringent or extensive regulatory requirements based on local or regional conditions or policy considerations. The Guide complements, but does not supersede, those regulatory programs; it can help you make decisions on meeting applicable regulatory requirements and filling potential gaps. Facility managers and the public should consult with the appropriate regulatory agency throughout the process to understand regulatory requirements and how to use this Guide. 

Fostering partnerships. The public, facility managers, state and local governments, and tribes share a common interest in preserving quality neighborhoods, protecting the environment and public health, and enhancing the economic well-being of the community. The Guide can provide a common technical framework to facilitate discussion and help stakeholders work together to achieve meaningful environmental results.

I think we all agree India's human waste problem is terrible. Certainly Americans would be repulsed if that practice became legal in the USA.

So, why is it coal the Trump White House signed a bill to repeal the requirement for coal companies from dumping it's waste into streams? This goes back to January. The very first act of the Trump White House was to return danger to American's lives. "W" it was arsenic, Snyder it is lead and now Trump likes generalized pollution that includes radioactive waste. 

February 16, 2017
By Brad Plumer

...one of Congress' very first acts...(click herewould be to kill an obscure Obama-era regulation that restricts coal companies from dumping mining waste into streams and waterways.

But that is indeed what’s going on. In early February, the House and Senate voted to repeal the so-called “stream protection rule” — using a regulation-killing tool known as the Congressional Review Act. On Thursday, President Trump signed the bill, which means the stream protection rule is now dead. Coal companies will have a freer hand in dumping mining debris in streams.

Killing this regulation won’t exactly fulfill Trump’s goal of reversing the coal industry’s decline; that decline has more to do with cheap natural gas than anything else. Instead, Republicans are mostly focusing on this rule because they can. Because the stream protection rule wasn’t finished until very late in 2016, it’s much, much easier to kill than most of the other Obama-era rules around coal pollution. It was a ready target, so long as the GOP acted fast...

"History of Technology" (click here)
By Edward R. Golding

Below is the bottom of page 200 and the top of page 206. The book clearly states on page 206 there are radioactive elements in raw coal. Those elements become more dense and more dangerous with the burning of coal as they fall out of the burning process. However, the point is, Scott Pruitt thinks nothing of coal dust containing all kinds of pollutants, the least of all radioactive and toxic elements into streams. 















The destructive force, called "heat," took place in the complete blackness of the Antarctica winter. That should say something for the dire circumstances we are facing with Earth under the influence of anthropogenic warming.

The heat surrounding the fragmented ice shelve should be a stark reality for everyone.

September 16,2017

A lot happened (click here) on the Antarctic Peninsula under the cloak of the 2017 polar night—most notably, the calving of a massive iceberg from the Larsen C ice shelf. At the time (July), scientists had to rely on thermal imagery and radar data to observe the break and to watch the subsequent motion of the ice....


...The image on the left shows the icebergs in natural color. The rifts on the main berg and ice shelf stand out, while clouds on the east side cast a shadow on the berg. The thermal image on the right shows the same area in false-color. Note that the clouds over the ice shelf do not show up as well in the thermal image because they are about the same temperature as the shelf. Thermal imagery has the advantage of showing where the colder ice ends and “warm” water of the Weddell Sea begins. It also indicates differences in the thickness of ice types. For example, the mélange is thicker (has a colder signal) than the frazil ice, but thinner (warmer signal) than the shelf and icebergs.

Both images show a thin layer of frazil ice, which does not offer much resistance as winds, tides, and currents try to move the massive iceberg away from the Larsen C ice shelf. In a few weeks of observations, scientists have seen the passage widen between the main iceberg and the front of the shelf. This slow widening comes after an initial back-and-forth movement in July broke the main berg into two large pieces, which the U.S. National Ice Center named A-68A and A-68B. The collisions also produced a handful of pieces too small to be named.
It's Sunday Night

Speaking of defecation:

June 17, 2014
By Shannti Dinnoo

It's early morning (click here) and local commuters are queuing up for tickets at the Kirti Nagar railway station in the Indian capital, Delhi.Along the tracks, another crowd is gathering - each person on his own, separated by a modest distance. They are among the 48% of Indians who do not have access to proper sanitation.

Coming from a slum close-by, they squat among the few trees and bushes along the railway tracks and defecate in the open.

To many, this is a daily morning ritual despite the hazards of contracting diseases such as diarrhoea and hepatitis.

It can be even more hazardous for women since each time a woman uses the outdoors to relieve herself, she faces a danger of sexual assault.

Recently two teenage girls from the state of Uttar Pradesh were gang-raped and found hanging from a tree after they left their village home to go to the toilet. Their house, like hundreds of millions of others in the country, did not have any facilities....

May 9, 2017
By Gaurav

One billion people (click here) worldwide still practice “open defecation.” India alone has an estimated 600 million people defecating openly, according to a study by the United Nations, accounting for more open defecation than any other country in the world. According to Bruce Gordon, acting coordinator for Sanitation and Health at the World Health Organization, open defecation results in the spread of a number of diseases, including cholera, diarrhea, dysentery, hepatitis A, and typhoid.

In a blog post titled, “India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste,” Bill Gates recently commended Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for launching the “Clean India” campaign, which aims to end open defecation by October 2, 2019 and install 75 million toilets across the country.

Gates does not know the reality on the ground in India. Indian bureaucrats, with the connivance of local politicians, are lining their pockets under this scheme by building unusable or event non-existent toilets....

Defecation - Side Effects

"Side effects" by Defication (click here for an official website - thank you)

The possibilities are unpredictable
With the continuous use of impurity
How could this be contained
With the negligence of authorities
Tainted world loss of purity
Pollution, contamination with durability
Fucked up food and fucked up water
Chemicals, by-products impossible to alter
Contaminated by industrial wastes
Consequences must await

Contamination to our bodies
Defiling human qualities
Not hard to contradict-that
Bodily harm we will afflict
Contaminated by industrial wastes
Consequences must await
Contamination to our bodies
Defiling human qualities
Not hard to contradict-that
Bodily harm we will afflict