How Amazon, American Airlines And Subaru Burn Waste To Make Energy
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 พ.ค. 2024
- Burning waste to make energy is a $10 billion industry in the U.S., and the fastest growing part of the business is waste from big companies like Amazon, Subaru, Quest Diagnostics and American Airlines. They’re part of a growing corporate movement toward “zero landfill” as pressure mounts to reach sustainability requirements. CNBC got an inside look at a waste-to-energy plant where trash is incinerated to power 18,000 homes in northern California.
00:00 -- Intro
1:48 -- The push for zero landfill
6:01 -- How energy recovery works
9:04 -- Emissions and toxic ash
12:19 -- Follow the money
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How Amazon, American Airlines And Subaru Burn Waste To Make Energy
I'm not an environmentalist by any means, but I'd love to see a huge reduction in the amount of packaging in consumer products.
I haven't had trash service at my home for the 10 years I've lived here. Everything I want to throw out has to go in my car and carried to a dumpster in town. You quickly learn just how much unnecessary packaging there is and it gets extremely frustrating.
What? No trash service? Where do you live, if you don't mind the question?
I imagine moving the trash can be frustrating even with a car,but without it...
We don't have one and it would be a nightmare to move the trash everytime.
@@Draco19970125 Florida. In one of the odd counties which only has trash pickup once a week, and happens to be one of the days I'm never home because I'm on the road working. Even during the lockdowns, I still had to travel for work being an "essential" worker (yay me.../sarcasm). And that's if they bother to pick up. I heard that they skipped last week, so people had 2-week old trash sitting in the Florida heat waiting to be picked up...yum.
The trash situation might not have been as much of an issue if I had a pickup truck or SUV, but I don't... I have a passenger car. A rather nice one, with a *white* interior. So, my toilet, garbage disposer, and the local racoons get used quite heavily to help reduce how much goes in my bin.
@@grayrabbit2211 Get a utility trailer and put your garbage bins on that. Or get a ATV or golf cart with a wagon.
@@huskyvacs I'm not about to put a hitch on a Mercedes or Bentley. Nope. Golf cart / ATV can't be driven on the roads here. My dump location is 10 miles north of me.
@@grayrabbit2211 lol sounds like rich entitlement problems. you probably bulldozed some wildlife to build some ugly ass mcmansion with your dwindling pension fund.
My trash index:
-Food waste/biodegradables goes to compost
-Paper goes to recycle or saved for winter for fire. Ashes goes to compost
-Wood saved for winter for fire. Ashes goes to compost
-Plastic Aluminum and all other metals goes to the local recycling company
-Unused clothes and similar material goes to Goodwill
-Furniture gets disassembled. Wood is burned during the winter, clothed is reused for cleaning rags & mops.
Lies again? Google Drive Buy Trash
In Scandinavia, we have burnt all our waste since the 1980s. All landfills are closed down. Unbelievable that the US is so far behind.
The few thermal power plants that exists in the US are hopelessly inefficient too since they don't have district heating. Considering 2/3 of all energy from burning trash is heat and only 1/3 is electricity.
So turn the US into multiple Scandanavian size countries? Rural areas in the US have been burning their waste since the 80s and beyond.
"Until consumer behaviour changes..." When will it change? Companies will not intentionally reduce their profits. Governments will not take big steps to regulate because they are backed by corporate money everywhere in the world (not fast enough anyway). Public pressure need to outweigh the corporate backing for change start to happen.
It is because of consumer behaviors. Stop trying to blame the government and corporations for simply producing what people want in the first place.
If you go in France and then in the USA, you will see that the SAME companies sell DIFFERENT products in both countries. Why? Because the only thing companies do is supply what their target consumers want to purchase. For example, in Europe, Volkswagen only sells small cars, most models available have NEVER been available in North America. In contrast, in North America, Volkswagen sells big SUVs, some like the Atlas are so big that they aren't even offered in Europe. The most profitable vehicle from Volkswagen, the Golf, isn't available anymore in the USA since 2-3 years because they didn't sell. Actually, all car manufacturers (Toyota, Ford, Volkswagen, Honda and so on) all stopped selling small vehicles in North America becuase they didn't sell.
Actually, if it was just a question of profits, Volkswagen would only sell the Golf in all markets, because they would make much more profits by having to manufacture just one car sold at a premium price for its performance. But that's not how life works. Companies can't sell something that people don't want in the first place.
Pollution will be reduced when everyone will make efforts to change their lifestyle. The average American consumer produces more than twice more trash, almost 3 times more CO2 and consumes almost 4 times more water than the average French citizen. All of this is because both French and American citizens have different lifestyles and consumption behaviors.
I have this same question. As a consumer, which we all are, what is behavior I need to change? I think the problem is more on the producer side. For example there is more and more non-recyclble plastic in my grocery store that is replacing recyclable glass or other types of packing.
@@SoFallsWichitaFalls There are litterally thousands of examples of behaviors you can change. Like not purchasing a 4x4 SUV (if you don't need it for work or because you have a big family), not taking the airplane every year, never purchasing anything on Amazon or at Walmart, like changing your diet, purchasing higher quality products, taking care of what you own so that it lasts longer, moving closer from your workplace so that you can stop using your car every day, buying products that aren't packaged in 5 layers of cardboard and plastic when there are alternatives, and so on.
Companies produce what consumers want. If people don't care about where the products they buy come from, then the result is that a lot of pollution is generated in the process. Go read my previous comment. The simple fact that companies sell different products in France and in the USA is a proof that companies produce what consumers want.
The only way corporations will change their ways is regulation. They hadn’t paid taxes in forever because they didn’t have to. There was a loophole. The only way we’ve recovered that money is by getting rid of the loophole.
@@alexlabs4858 Regulations + a change of consumer behaviors.
I have personal hauled 40ft containers to the Incinerators filled with shoes, purses. Safety gear like steel toe boots. Gloves, safety glasses, 3m masks etc. I asked my boss if I can pick threw it and they said no. It is sick what they made us throw out.
In Europe?
@@connectorxp Canada
@@rockyjohnson9243 makes sense. In Europe this practices tend to be let in the press and have the greens bombarding the companies with protests.
You should see grocery stores
I grew up near Baltimore, MD. where the city utilizes energy from burning municipal waste. I always wondered why it wasn't a more commonly utilized energy source.
so you breath it instead why are people so dumb balt has an extremely high cancer rate
It's sad that North America so often appears more than 30 years behind Europe in so many ways.
1) In the early 80's, hands-free phones while driving in the UK
2) In Liechtenstein, in the early 80's, drivers were required to turn their vehicles off when they were further than the third car from the front of a line at a red light.
3) Europeans (and China) have done extensive studies on traffic regarding safety (vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists), traffic flow and the optimum length of a traffic light cycle (The time from when a specific light at an intersection turns green to the next time it turns green). It's 31 seconds max!
4) In Switzerland, clothes dryers are banned in residences. Instead, they use a spinner that removes so much water that the laundry is perfect for ironing or they hang the laundry indoors, and use a fan to dry the laundry fully. Note: Switzerland rarely has high humidity.
5) Incinerators: In the early 80's, Germany built an incinerator that was fully controlled by a computer with one person overseeing the operation. The building had a pit in the middle and there were doors, similar to garage doors, on three sides of the building. The garbage trucks (Europe has been recycling paper, glass, plastic and metal for decades) back up to the open 'garage' door and dump the waste onto a platform below surface level. Then, from below where the garage door is, a blade like a bulldozer blade, pushes the garbage into the incinerator pit. But, this is controlled bym the computer to maintain an optimum temperature to burn the cleanest. The heat also turned turbines, producing electricity.
6) In Switzerland, since before 1982, everyone took their glass and plastics with them to the grocery store, where they put them in the proper bins. Glass was sorted according to colour (green, brown and clear) and plastics according to type. This way a LOT less trucking occurred. Who doesn't go to the grocery store? Nowadays, metals are also collected. If one has any garbage that is not compostable or recyclable, one pays to have it removed. It's not cheap. For example, one searches for a company willing to take used furniture to resell. (There's no Ikea in Switzerland because most of its furniture doesn't last long enough and is overall not best for the environment in the long term.
7) Switzerland has long be considered a 'battery' in Europe. It has many hydro-electric dams. However, at times other countries in Europe produce too much electricity. This is sent to Switzerland where it is used to pump water back up into the reservoir, in effect storing the electricity. Ontario claims they do the same, but I have never come across such a site.
8) In flues from industry, including incinerators there are three gases which need to be trapped because of their negative effect on the environment. One of my father's (Dr. of chemistry) ideas was to install three racks, one for each undesirable gas, in the flues. Each rack held pellets which would absorb a specific gas, such as sulphur. In addition, the pellets could then be sold to industries that use said 'gases' (or chemical elements), who would extract them.
With the invention of the internet, there is no reason North America should be so far behind Europe.
It is my opinion that its a result of the mindset of politicians and government employees. Too often I have found that they do not want to listen to solid, logical solutions from 'outside,' i.e., 'outsiders' don't know what they're talking about or it might be 'too much trouble' (LOL!) or the proposal would cost the politicians political donations.
Example: The mayor of Ottawa ,and many city counsellors, received campaign contributions from a specific developer's family members. The mayor alone received $11,0000 from one family. The developer's proposal will send untreated storm water directly into a small stream. This stream is already flooding much needed sportfields. Storm water runoff contains contaminated waste, such as, rubber from vehicle tires, oils from the same, road salt (Really good at killing both wildlife and vegetation), and an expensive liquid chemical blend which the city sprays on the road salt to make it activate slightly faster. The city council approved this proposal even though there were protests against it.
I lived near one. The whole city reaked of burnt trash. It would just seap into your house and furniture it was brutal. They finally closed it down a few years ago and it took over 3 years before the city stopped smelling like burnt trash
This is unfortunate, it must have been a badly designed one.
In my city of almost 2 million people we have two waste to energy incinerators for our municipal waste and the air is very clean, even directly around the facilities.
That is very unfortunate, look up Copenhagen skisloop waste incinerator, it can definitely be odor free.
@@naitsirk32 I was sad it closed. I worked for a garbage company that took trash there. We had to travel 40 minutes further to a land fill. I don't miss the burning in my eyes every time I dumped there
Is that the Detroit incinerator?
I find this odd... We've had incinerators, er "waste to energy plants", here since the 1990s. My office does all of its document destruction by disposing of it at the incinerator. I've made this trip many times over the years. No smell at all. They even let me watch the boxes get loaded into the conveyor belt and into the burner, so I'm that close to it. Again, no odor issues at all.
Now sewage plants around here are a different issue -- those can really stink when our population shifts between snowbird season & locals season.
I am glad they mentioned landfill emissions. Most people think we bury it and its safely packed away. But actually tons of it slowly rots away and releases methane and other toxic gasses. Burning it at a very high temperature will destroy all chemicals, poisonous gasses, plastics and refrigeration gasses like R12 and R22. The resulting energy recovery is a huge bonus. Plus with modern exhaust after treatments we have today older plants can be up fitted to make them even cleaner.
The fact that we still bury waste is insane. What a waste of space.
So we should burn all of it?
There's plenty of space.
while i have been chased out of my community by the heinous smells of a sanitary landfill, the argument is made that burying it sequesters the carbon content. now i live in the locality of the united states' biggest lead acid battery recycler who grinds em up and burns them in a furnace that once smelted lead and zinc ore. and i only smell sulfur dioxide a tenth of the time i used to smell urban sanitary waste at the old location.
@@hardrays and you chose to move there?
@@TheFatblob25 yes there is.
All that clothes and textiles can be converted to insulation. I remodeled my home and used Ultratouch, recycled jeans/clothing insulation treated with boric acid. Ultratouch is sold through Lowes and Home Depot. It is insect and fire proof and provides excellent R factor and noise reduction.
FABULOUS. Phase out the other types.
Yes 😭 and I work as a tailor and dressmaker and in the past year I've only purchased new fabric once. Like I can make just about anything out of all the stuff in thrift shops and cast-offs from friends and trash. 🤷♂️🤷♂️
In the US we must also get used to repairing things ☝️☝️
I love this! Now do they accept shipments of clothes from anyone? if so, what would be the best way to do it?
Denmark recently launched a nationwide recycling program where household waste is separated into 4 or more separate bins. On top of that we have local recycling centres accepting more than 20 types of waste. They recently cracked down on “burnable” waste, ie this is the last resort option.
Yeah, we have something similar in Hungary, the plastic and the paper go into separate trash cans. But unfortunately, many times it is just for show, because the government mix them up again after they brought the trash from here.
Same in Germany and Austria
In my area, you pay extra for recycling. So I don't and everything goes into the bin saving me $.
Recycling plastic is a huge lie ! Most of it is shipped to third world countries and stored or burned in open pits . Or just stored in large buildings or dumped in the ocean. Most industrialized countries have made recycling a good thing but it’s mostly a lie for plastic. They just send it to other places. At least by burning it here it’s being reused . Do some research on plastic recycling. It’s terrible the lies that have been told . Metal is absolutely the best thing you can recycle. The rest is trash .
Participation is key.
First thought...is amazon burning returns to make energy 😂😂😂
Yeah when they can resale that and make more money
How about we fix the problem at the source by producing and consuming less?
Fix all the problems! But in the end, you will have some trash with no solution. There only appropriate answer to that is incineration.
your not going to like the answer. less humans = less demand. dont wait for humans to dial back their id because they wont and thus the problem persists with a humanist veil of optimism to pacify those who feel the need for gentle options. so do like i did and dont have kids and dial the numbers back a little. but what about the cretans? thats a problem for a future hitler i guess, but it wont be my sweet progeny they exterminate.
Free markets require perpetual growth and consumption to create jobs. Technically speaking, we could use science and technology to create a zero waste high abundance economy, but the caveat is that it requires humans to agree, rarely do we agree on anything
That's exactly what should focus on all the environmentalist, like the guy with glasses in this video. Instead of trashing all the solutions available right now. And waste to energy is so far the best way available.
There’s an infinitely wide chasm between what people should do, and what they’ll actually end up doing.
The production of goods based on a consuming economy, where you use and throw away, excessive packaging, lack of recyclable products and actions, lack of donations on the don't-need-it-anymore products, that's the problem.
Iam an indian I worked same waste to energy plant in visakhapatnam. 15 MW power generation/hour &1200 TPD MSW usage. Really great experience.
Why don't we take the waste already in landfills and incinerate it?
I mean, I know the transportation to an incinerator would be a problem, but why not just build the incinerator at the landfill? There's probably enough fuel source at large landfills to last decades and make it worthwhile. Plus all the metal recovered.
I suspect that may happen in the future
Many countries are doing that, India for example
I think one of the solutions to producing less waste is by producing less materials in the first place. 50% reduction is probably too big a number to start, but something like a 5% decrease could be a great start.
Amazon also uses "energy recovery" when it has surplus items in their warehouses, items that in many cases are still usable (laptops, tools, etc.), but just wouldn't turn a profit.
th-cam.com/video/mxqz2g05MTI/w-d-xo.html
yep, that's kinda like the degrowth movement
Most of the waste generated on a daily basis by individuals comes from industrial food consumption. By simply learning to cook by yourself using fresh ingredients and by composting your food waste, you can reduce your trash by an astonishing amount. The rest of the trash comes from the overconsumption of all the cheap products imported from the other side of the planet. The transformation and transportation processes required to bring all that stuff to someone's house creates a massive amount of trash. So another way to reduce trash is to encourage smaller local businesses and to select goods of higher quality that will last for a longer time
Nationalise all the waste companies, than with all centralized in federal level, you will be free to manage with much more efficiency, without the states have the power to miss manage the waste.
The goal must be 70% recycled, 30% burned to energy recover.
But the first step must be to build now the enough waste burn facilities, both for the waste levels of the total national, and as well to start to burn the already burried waste in the active and closed landfills around all the nation.
Remember that we need ground water to survive, and wadte landfills are poisoning the water that your next generation will need to drink.
Cleaning the land, allows to clean the rivers and ground water sheets.
Besides recovering a lot of metals...
@@ricardoxavier827 Nationalizing and centralizing is the least effective. the free market always finds the most effective way.
Home Depot does this too. They would rather destroy it and trash it then to sell it at a reduced price.
This should be done more often. Plastics can only be recycled a few times before the polymers break down and can not be reused. Burning it makes sense. This means oil and natural gas is not burned for the same energy.
It is still fossil fuels, so there is no environmental benefit when used in energy production.
@@Tore_Lund How do you figure? The alternatives for non-recyclable plastics is to landfill them, also forgoing the energy they contain.
@@tookitogo If you only consider it a trash problem, then burning it seems better, but energy wise this is not a renewable source, even if it is a waste product. It is about how you calculate that: Fossil fuels used in engines has a higher energy yield per CO2 molecules emitted, than burning plastic in a furnace to generate steam. In Germany they have pilot plants for pyrolyzing plastics into diesel and gasoline like fuels. That recovers 90% of the energy content gone into producing the plastic in the first place.
@@Tore_Lund Unless that technology a) consumes significantly less resources than it yields, and b) works on plastics that are contaminated, then it’s unlikely to be a practical solution. If it can, then awesome. Of course, incineration still remains an option for wastes that can’t be recycled/converted or composted. Composite materials like laminated paper remain a huge problem. :/
@@tookitogo I think we agree, that burning is the better option, but the problem is the waste being generated in the first place. You can pyrolyze dirty plastics.
Great news I've been looking for something like this to happen here in America after watching Germany recycles so much
This is just another example of doing the most economic expedient bad thing instead of doing the right thing by maximizing recycling and reuse of these valuable materials. Corporations do this all the time instead of doing the right thing. The toxic ash left from the combustion process is still a landfill problem and even with scrubbers, there is still air pollution emissions. This is not the best solution only the cheapest solution.
True words. Same with burning biological waste like vegetables and stuff to make gas. All resources are removed from the earth and the soil needs more artificial fertilizer till it dies. They will only understand once resources become so spare and overpopulation so big that everything will get extreme expensive or all land already became toxic.
It's like they said... This is fighting for last place. Don't really know why this needed to have a video made for a celebration of last place. I guess it laid out what the big corps probably mean when they say they're making "Zero Landfill Waste" or "Landfill Free" products, but this also seemed like a LOT of water carrying for a terrible industry.
All about making more $, sad.
I requres a lot of energy to recyclce, most economic and green is to bury it, not burn it
Amazon is such a bad company. Shame on Jeff Bezos.
Mercury emissions and the cost to monitor and clean them. Thats why incineration has lost its share in the waste stream.
That’s why modern incinerators use exhaust scrubbers to trap toxic emissions.
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can you endorse any ?
TERESA JENSEN WHITE does a perfect job. look her up on the web
thanks a lot . Found her website and it impressive
Amazon could save a ton of money, if they just made the UPS Return label addressed to the incineration plant, lol
Do all Amazon items returned get destroyed?
@@congresssux9766 alot are sold at auctions, etc, they probably know which ones would be incenerated, so could automate it, haha
Nowadays Amazon should just ship the items people buy directly to the incineration plant as a majority of what they sell is cheap Chinese made crap.
Toxic ash gets used in highways… meaning that when it rains, highways leach toxic dust into streams.
Correct, Asphalt roadways are a MAJOR source of environmental pollution, adding extra toxic parts to it isn't really the way forward.
Fly ash turns as hard as concrete so there’s no toxic dust . I work at one of these mass burns .
In europe you use the bottom ash for road building. The fly ash doesnt get mixed in. The fly ash is used as filler in salt mines below the ground water body so it cant leach.
seems like a lot of this could be easily addressed with:
a. better materials. e.g. more r&d into eco-friendly plastics and the like. a small tax on virgin plastic would help a lot as well. and basically phase out as many unsustainable or unhealthy materials as possible.
b. better recycling: better programs and technology for separating items. this should be partly funded by an EPR policy. Also, products should be manufactured in a way to ease the recycling process. re-use should be part of the design.
while consumption should be reduced, changing human behavior is the hardest path of all. and with sustainable materials, all our waste would be much less of an issue.
That’d all be great, unfortunately we’re ruled by greedy, corrupt, shortsighted pigs who don’t even care about our water, infrastructure, let alone our freedom. But god forbid anybody touches their insider trading or weapons of mass destruction 🙄
There are no eco-friendly plastics. That's a myth created by the plastics industry.
Your solutions look to me like:
a. $$$$
b. $$$$
I agree with you but each of these steps will cost more, and of course those costs will eventually trickle down to the consumers in the form of hiked up prices… you can see how higher costs can be a problem to companies as well as consumers (just see what’s going on right now with inflation)
@@mikezerker6925 : The costs to consumers would be fairly negligible.
Or simply get ourselves out of this consuming based fashion; stop buying into cheap one off clothing, smart devices every 18-24m (phones, smart gadgets, etc), new age gadgets we *think* it's a necessity but actually isn't (smart door bell, cctv, trackers, tablets, etc etc).
Problem is people want perfect answers. Not the best answer. So trouble makers will picknat everything that's not perfect, and nothing gets done.
Yes. As much as you want to nit pick the problems with incineration, the alternative is landfill. Completely stupid to pick landfill.
Personally, I think this is a lot better than having it all go in the ocean.
Exactly
Informative & enlighting video! I did not know that burning waste is actually MORE enviromental friendly than landfill.
for the record they are both still incredibly bad for the enviroment
@@MrSquekersUPSB & Jake Walton - You guys did not watch the whole video, did you? Just look at the title, and speak from your behind? Educate yourself, please!
@@richardduydang8248 you got me!
Im not entierly sure what all this plasic burns into as plastic can hold particals of masses as there recycled over and over and over again but looks like copper and other things get burned too which then makes me worry that electric fly swatter is my evidence and if it has batteries still in it then enviormently friendly is a joke right
Is not dummy
We need more of those incinerator plants
I wonder if they are removing glass and metal first.
Kinda funny it's classified as green energy. By that logic, we could get to 100% green power by buying coal and throwing it immediately in the trashcan.
I'm not sure about all the details but I think the EU considers incineration as partially renewable. The non-renewable % being basically the contribution of plastics to the heating value of the average trash bin.
Someone bought back the steam engine!
I wish they would donate and recycle more, I saw so many boxes. Composting is another great way to go about this. And of course reducing.
In Norway, the WTE is free for all persons to use. If you move and you have a sofa, left over paint, TV, clothes and basicly what you have in a home it free to get rid of. When you get to there you put your trash in large bins for metal, wood, electronics etc. They will burn your sofa, melt your TV. Well, you get the picture? No you do not because the TV just melted. Haha. Bad humor on my part. That heat will be used in Oslo where I live to heat up almost 1/8 of the city. They have huge hot water pipes under ground from this WTE plant that goes in to my apt. So I turn on the radiator in my bedroom the WTE can be as far away as 13 miles. Just like they said in the program Scandinavia is so small that we have to import trash from Germany. The natural winner here is Iceland. The WTE from volcanos is super awesome! When I die I want to be burned. Some people say that my life was waisted. My death will for sure no be. Lol! Sorry. My sick humor again. Be safe and try to enjoy life!
Use Singapore's example: 1) Extract ALL recyclables. Recycle it.
2) Extract all compostable parts. Compost it.
3) Waste to energy ( burn) the rest.
12:00 is it safe? would you live hear one?
him: "yeah, I happily lived near one for years before I knew anything about this industry"
either that was his slick way of dodging the question, or he bad at PR
I can vaguely remember when I was very young, probably early 1950's, visiting out town's new incinerator plant on Long Island. Probably didn't even make electricity.
Hah, I could imagine what everything they have burned. And ashes maybe dumbed at sea. But waste was so different back then. But there were still very bad toxins with waste. And control.. what controll? It was solution at the time and we get better with time and needed those people's too who have ideas how to make it better. Companies that sold just $hit for people's and if turn back rate is something over 10% then there is scam. And system like that must fell down. It's just stealing from buyers and they stayed so stupid to buy more $hit products, because they can send them back after day of use. Sometimes they forgot to do it and then seller gets more profit. I guess that everything they throw away has price that could delete from taxes..? Those who make this business aren't stupid, they are who let it happen if something not fit in case..
Probably not, because in the 50's oil was pretty cheap. But the first documented incinerator producing electricity dates back to 1888 in Manchester UK, just a few years after Edison's coal plant.
Here's the thing: WTE should not take the place of recycling. The head of sustainability says that the facility only takes items that can't be recycled but glass, paper, some types of plastic, and all the cardboard shown in many scenes, can be recycled before burning. Communities need to know that WTE means saving space ok landfills...not just throwing everything away.
“Zero Landfill” is misleading. I am an environmental engineer, and I have worked with several of these waste-to-energy (which is just a nicer way to say “incinerator”) facilities, and there is still a significant amount of ash left over after the burning is complete that still needs to be disposed of. This ash, along with used filters and other disposable materials that remove toxic gases from the exhaust all go to landfills.
This isn’t to say that waste-to-energy is necessarily bad for the environment, but it is not as perfect a solution as this video describes. There is still waste leftover to be disposed of, and there exist incineration facilities in the US that don’t abide by regulations and pollute the air like you wouldn’t believe. It really depends on how well these facilities are managed, and how environmentally conscious they are. But of course with proper waste reduction, we won’t need to worry about that so much.
Ash is used in concrete...
One thing they didn't mention in this article is whether any of the waste Amazon is sending to them has been sorted for recyclables that could go to a recycling facility instead of an incinerator. They talked a lot about toxic metals that are in the ashes, couldn't they eliminate some of these toxic wastes by removing them from the waste input stream? This video poses more questions than it does answers, I could go on for a while about this.
Probably makes a lot of sense. Recyclable bins go straight to the dump anyways.
The heavy metals are filtered from the ash after combustion.
I hate that this energy is considered renewable by the US government. A group of lobbyists must have made a fortune from that policy decision. This is a wasteful process. It will never recover enough energy to replace the energy cost to produce the material.
The material is too far gone to be used anywhere.
It's considered "recycling" by the most environmentally-progressive countries in the world. No reason it shouldn't be here. If these plants didn't exist, that energy would have to be made from somewhere else, usually fossil fuels.
Covanta crows landing, worked there as a contractor. That ash is gnarly...super corrosive and destroys anything it lands on
I’m no scientist or environmentalists, but this would help get rid of landfills and have beautiful land scenery again. As well as lessen gasses that are warm our atmosphere and poisoning our lands with harmful chemicals that release in the landfills
Amazon could just donate the returned items to people in need or to third world countries.
it wouldn't make sense economically, it's cheaper to send stuff in landfills rather than giving it away.
There is a lot which is donated through other organizations. But now even in third world countries only fraction of this is used, rest goes to the poorly managed landfills or oceans. We are just producing and trashing a lot.
They probably donated it in the form of waste to pile up in their countries... lol
The returned items are defective or damaged. Shipping it to another country would mean it would just end up in landfills there instead.
"third word countries" do not need your wastes. Thank you.
There will be less waste only if attitudes change. I am looking forward to a day when celebrities wear the same clothes to at least two events.
I haul roll off dumpsters for a living. We pay like $60 a ton to dispose of trash at the landfill or transfer station but close to $80 a ton to dispose of trash at our local waste to energy facility.
5/20/22...WHAT happens to the ash waste/waste ash?
Possibly used for fertilizer?
Just PLEASE know what the Chemistry is in your FIRE 🔥 BOX 📦
i bet people dont understand that a combustion chamber is a reactor. a chemical cracker if its an incinerator like the current video. i doubt that they monitor the exhaust on an ongoing basis for no-no stuff that isn't a component for which the scrubber was designed.
But even inceneration is not the answer ! .... One problem ends the other comes up ! ....
Wrong
It's not about the quantity of problems, it's about the quality of the solutions. We're unlikely to find a single answer that leads to zero problems, so the goal is to find a combination that causes the least damage. Any benefits such as energy and metal recovery are just nice extras. We need to focus on creating as little waste as possible in the first place.
How much waste a household produces weekly ? Most of it would be food waste. That can be diverted to produce fertiliser & the waste water for gardening. That would substancially reduce landfill. Most of the car items can be recycled. Most of the household furniture can be recycled. The plastic bags of bread and other food packets can be recycled. Egg Cartons can be reused. All cardboard can be reused and recycled.
That was a good overview! Thanks for the educationist that!!
There's one here in the ST. Pete, Clearwater, Florida area called Toy Town. It's been here for probably 40 years now. It generates electricity. This is nothing new.
Still waiting for plasmafication (plasma gasification) to replace incinerators, more energy extraction and less waste.
i looked that up. if i stick electrodes in the flare of my boiler i think i have the retrofit mod. no more waiting.
Plasma gasification IS a type of incineration -- one that's even more expensive, doesn't work on heterogeneous waste streams, cannot scale up, and is comparably polluting. You'll be waiting a while... and for no reason, because nothing about it makes any sense.
I worked as a carny, they had scary rides and scary people.
We had a few accidents. Ride got unstable and had to be stopped. Ferris wheel, started running in wrong direction, out of control, and no braking.as was on fire
That's what South Africa should be doing big time.
15:00 they do repackage and resell that stuff, my man. I've had the unfortunate mistake of buying some of it. Bought a fondue set that had food(?) residue and stains left on it. How the hell are you going to try and resell that?
They don't need to repackage this stuff. They need to start distributing it out to homeless shelters.
When I was homeless the one thing I really wanted but couldn’t afford was a fondue set, it really would have been nice to have some friends over to my refrigerator box to fondue some meat I dug out of the dumpster.
I can't believe Subaru burns and bury its waste.
@Admin+①⑨③7⑥⑦0⓪②④6 do you think I’m stupid enough to fall for your scams Indians. 😐
Interesting documentary Green energy and recycling are the best options
Some parts of australia is almost 300 a ton for landfill
The easy way is not always the right way.
Why anyone would continue to buy there crap is beyond me. Buy local.
Subaru plants trees as well! Double win, environmentally in my opinion.
The University of Notre Dame does this with food scraps, pretty neat to know 2 dining halls pretty much power an entire campus!
This along with the video can be a better solution to eliminate waste, save the environment, and power our societies. We're already using the products when we purchase it, why not see things until their completion rather than letting the full potential go to waste?
Making better quality items will also result in less waste.
We have one of these plants about 10 miles away. It smells once in a while, like sulphur and hot garbage/chemical smell. The cooling towers look sketchy af when it rains.
It would be interesting to compare a clean coal burning plant with this and compare emissions and the toxins of the ash produced
The alternative is landfills, which are far worse for the environment. One of the worst ways to deal with waste. Thats why most developed countrys use this process for everything that is not recycleable. The energy is a nice byproduct.
New plants can filter the exiting gas and the only harmful materials worth mentioning is the resulting co2 and fly ash. The bottom ash (most of the ash produced) is generally considered safe to use in construction. The co2 emissions are better than the methane emissions of landfills, which a 25x more climate damaging than co2. The fly ash can be solidified and used as filler in for example salt mines below the water table so it cant leach.
Amazon returns are all kept in there facilities.... they have a mile long row of returns where I worked...
This is done all over Europe, Norway even imports trash, but American greens remain in opposition to any waste burning
Your comparison is completely stupid. Norway is far more advanced at separting trash from things that are actually recyclable and from food waste that can be composted. Americans simply throw everything in the same bin and think some kind of magic will sort all of it. Also, most Western Europeans consume MUCH less than Americans and thus produce MUCH less trash in the first place.
I’ve been saying this for years. Burying trash in a land fill is stupid. The fact we get energy from it is a bonus.
The wisest thing that should be on everyones' mind currently, should be, To invest in different streams of income that doesn't depend on the government, especially with the current economic crisis around the world.
And also, Being of age and how to manage the sequence of returns in those early periods is what seems quite scary in the current market. The market is never a loser in the twenty year cycle, but the 2000s decade scenario scares me and could really disrupt my retirement. When you're no longer accumulating but withdrawing, it's hard to be anything but cautious.
@@hoshifuyo4494 The pandemic really taught people the importance of multiple streams of income. Unfortunately, having a job doesn't guarantee 100% security, rather having different investments is the real deal.
@@jachikeonwuka3824 That's true,
I believe that the secret to financial stability is having the right investment ideas to enable you earn more money. But for now, investors getting started can feel overwhelming. Risk loom large and complicated, unfamiliar financial jargons can be intimidating.
Some investors look to their investments as a source of income while others use it as a means to grow or preserve their wealth.
Also, It is mostly disastrous for newbies or anyone who doesn't adhere to a well thought-out strategy and over all, a professional broker.
Airfill instead of landfill. IDK it's not perfect but it's great that electricity is produced, landfill is avoided, greenhouse gas emissions reduced & I REALLY hate air pollution but this seems the best thing to do with the stuff. Especially as long as burning coal is a thing. The biggest thing for me though is the metal recovery. It annoys me that after someone butchered the surface of the Earth to get a 100% infinitely recyclable resource outta the ground that we'll always need plus all the energy & sometimes chemically intensive work to process it, it then just got dumped right back in. I read that before companies like Li-Cycle started up it was sump'm like 95% of lithium batteries went to landfill?!!! I wonder if this can be used to recover that stuff too?
The argument used about greenhouse gas reduction is wrong. Methane from landfills comes from food waste, which can be composted in the first place like we do over here in Montréal, Canada.
The trash that is burnt is plastic and some kind of foams, which DON'T ever emit methane. Their main argument is completely false. By simply removing food waste, landfills stop producing methane.
@@PG-3462 Ah well if true that's disappointing. Oh well my conscience is clear I toss all my food scrap out my back door into the forest. I live in the forest.
Minneapolis - St. Paul has done this for years with there garbage for years. I worked there 20 years ago. I thought it was brilliant.
Minneapolis has one of those facilities right across the street from the Twins baseball stadium.
"Waste to energy" - yeah, pretty sure country folk invented the burn barrel. That's what this is, just on a much larger scale and with a few scrubbers if you're lucky.
No, it’s not the same. A burn barrel doesn’t recover energy. And the much higher burn temperatures in incinerators produce a far cleaner burn than an open burn.
@@tookitogo Exactly. I came across another similar comment in this comment section... It amazes me how many Americans don't understand even basic science...
@@tookitogo It's STILL incinerated. I took a little artistic leeway with the comments Mr. Literal. Incinerators aren't good for the environment and they aren't really "groundbreaking technology". You wanna impress me? Use fusion to destroy things in an incinerator. Anything less will leave something poisonous behind.
@@PG-3462 In all fairness, I actually don’t think most people elsewhere understand basic science, either… But Americans are somewhat singular in the way we, as a culture, celebrate ignorance.
@@tookitogo I understand the science just fine. You're simply in denial about how "clean" the emissions are. Sure those plants serve a purpose, but there are far better ways to generate power. It isn't clean and never will be.
This is the kind of world we've made for ourselves and our children, better have no enemies when the light goes out, due to the economic criss, wars and rate of unemployment I think now is the best time to invest and make more money for the future.
Investing today is priceless because tomorrow isn't promised, trading Bitcoin gold, sliver and crypto to secure a better tomorrow.
Its nice for people to talk about investment because investment always beats cash.
I understand that tomorrow isn't promised to anyone but investing today is a hard thing to do because I have no idea of how or where to invest.
Oh really I got confused also but, I was referred to Mr Alex Donaldson.
Good to see how you are busy came up here to show keen appreciation to Mr Donaldson this is how I got a recommendation him At first i was a bit scared.
Need more of this in the US
Valorization is good business, producing solid profitability. Hopefully, we see far more of it.
"Businesses are understanding sustainability," they say next to a facility that literally burns excess consumer goods that clearly never needed to be manufactured in the first place. Uh-huh. Right. Is it more sustainable than burning diesel and coal for electricity? Obviously, yes. Is it actually sustainable? LMAOOO. -- And, seriously, "far below US federal regulations"? Okay, as if the US has federal regulations relating to pollution, emissions, and hydrocarbons that make any sense and aren't literally 50 years behind the curve on climate change alone. -- "Until consumer behaviour changes," lol you know full well consumer behaviour won't change sufficiently or on time, and definitely not on it's own. That's what legislation is *for.*
This is basically an Amazon commercial
This contributes to global warming and the drought. it isn't any better than burying waste and may even be worse. it shouldn't be promoted as the right way to do things, it could be worse than burning coal as you have less control over what's being emitted. Rather the items being burned should be recycled and reused.
Concerning energy and resource saving the US are a developing country.
In Vienna, Austria one of the waste incineration plants started it's operation back in 1971.
And first one in USA was 1895. Beating Austria by 80years
@@fukyoutube444 The first incinerator in the U.S. was built in 1885 on Governors Island in New York.
The first full-scale, municipally operated incineration facility in the U.S. was the Arnold O. Chantland Resource Recovery Plant built in 1975 in Ames, Iowa.
The first full-scale, municipally operated incineration facility in Vienna, Austria went into full operation in 1964.
Beating the US by 11 years.
;-)
@@Sagittarius-A-Star I see now whatcha ment
A local college had a trash steam plant they operated for years. But the environmentalists complained about the smog they accused it of producing, so it was shut down. Now all trash goes to the landfill.
I don’t get what’s the problem? If you get les greenhouse gasses from burning it, than burying it, then just outlaw burying it and build a lot of new incinerators whit strict environmental standards. You could even collect the C02 and send it to a CO2 storage facility.
I know that you have to reduce waste and I have some ideas of doing that.
1. Regulate what materials stuff can be mad of. Make sure the materials are easy to recycle.
2. Increase the warranty period by law. Make sure its long so the industry is incentivized to make the product last.
3. Make a law that force producers to have a details repair plan for there products, so when it breaks it will be easy or at least possible to repair. Also make sure products are made whit the intension of being reappeared.
CO2 storage facility, such an odd thing to even think of but it is what it is I guess...
That sort of regulation would make conservatives puke in terror
You can’t just simply outlaw something in a snap of your fingers this is fundamentally flawed
The main argument used is false. They say burning trash reduces the amount of methane emitted by landfills... Methane in landfills comes from organic waste (basically from food, grass and leaves that make their way to landfills), which can be composted instead and all the methane can easily be collected. We do it over here in Montréal, Canada since a few years.
The trash they burn is plastic and cardboard, which both never emit methane in the first place. The whole argument is a pure lie and people only do it to get cheap energy and to avoid having to reduce their trash production.
We all just appreciate the content this man and his crew makes its just a masterpiece imagine what's he's gonna doing the future 💛....
Bmw is also an American entity that has done the same with waste recycling
When I was a kid in Cleveland our apartment had a incinerator in every building and dumpsters for cans. No landfill dumping and that was the 70's.
Yeah that's not the same thing.
BOOMERS literally throw away brand new items with zero fcks given that others would have loved to take their "trash" off their hands.
I know this first hand because I drive around and collect curb freebies and I have found garbage cans FULL of new items thrown away I rescued. It's so irritating how wasteful and irresponsible that whole generation is.
The land of plenty. I only buy exactly what I need and keep the left over $ in my bank account. Reuse what I have until its no longer useable to me. Then sell it or toss it.
Miranda Turner You really think the Boomers are the most wasteful generation? I seriously doubt it, their parents lived through the Great Depression, they are frugal.
@@ranz2355 frugal?????? drive around any cities nicer neighborhoods and I bet you will find 9 of every 10 mcmansion's will be owned by boomers. hell for most neighborhoods id even bet every gigantic home in a given neighborhood will be occupied boomer owned.
they typically tend to throw away items that are still working with zero care that someone else would absolutely be grateful to have said item. they waste money buying items just to show off to others or show they keep up with the Jones's.
for how poor their parents were they totally went off the rails when it came to reckless spending on unnecessary junk mainly because they spewed the narrative of how bad their childhood was growing up poor but they lack the ability to even learn the value of money because they only saw value in having money for the sake of having it just to buy whenever you had an urge to purchase.
look up statistics over the last few decades for boomers wealth vs everything generation and you will be able to see just how careless and wasteful their behavior is regarding financial decisions
@@MTurner504 I’ve noticed the children of Boomers, the Gen X and Millennials, are actually much more wasteful, while sanctimoniously telling everyone how much they are doing for the environment and the fight against “climate change.”
Mining millions of tons of dirt just to get the raw materials for the lithium-ion battery for their electric car is a total waste of natural resources, but no worries, the mining is in Asia or Africa so who cares, right?
Take a look at wind turbine recycling after their short 15 to 20 year lifespan. Very little is recyclable, most of them get buried in landfills. You really think it’s Boomers pushing these wasteful behemoths? No, they built nuclear and coal plants that will run for 50 or 74 years!
Education is another way the Millennials are being wasteful, after racking up the most student debt of any other generation (or had it paid for by their parents), they are the least likely to hold a job in the same field as their degrees.
Just because your folks aren’t dying off soon enough for you, or your relationship with them is so bad that you won’t be getting their house, you shouldn’t begrudge them for working hard and enjoying the fruits of their labor.
All this and people are wasting energy on cryptocurrency
There are cryptocurrencies that are running off proof of stake which use 99.999% less energy than traditional proof of work currencies like Bitcoin.
Proof if work is only profitable when you use cheaper electricity than your competition. Bitcoin mining uses excess power and renewable more than anything because it's cheaper.
But will they emissions be buried like clean coal or just pumped back into the air? If pumped back into the air, it's no better then landfills.
I think it's better to burn waste than landfill, no rats, cockroach in garbage area, and also used biodegradable packaging 🙂
It sounds like. At the end of the day, here is the US because of our limited thinking skills, we are missing out on some real opportunities to make our own lives better.
How much did they pay you to say this lmao
typical cnbc propaganda for hire rates, no doubt.
Remember, also leachate from landfill tips is difficult to manage. It can enter creeks and ground water systems with devastating results.
Only on old outdated landfills, they are a problem, but modern landfills are properly lined.
@@masaharumorimoto4761 There will come a day when the caps on the "modern landfills" will break down and erode away and these "properly lined" landfills will fill up with water and spill over and pollute the ground water. Most of what goes into a land fill is combustible and ultimately landfills will catch on fire and cause terrible air pollution. To prevent these scenarios from happening in the distant future we need to burn the trash that we are producing today and open up the land fills that we do have and start mining them for fuel and resources such as metal and glass.
10:43 Is this a ski slope on the roof?
This video is largely misinformation. Almost every point being made has a huge (probably deliberate) error in it. The chart at 13:46 is utterly false. Nuclear is not the second most expensive way to generate electricity, it is far and away the cheapest that's why nuclear power plants sell their energy at or below four cents per kwh which is about 1/5 of wind and solar. Gas generation varies from eight cents to thirty cents depending on how 'on demand' it is, and energy from waste is off-the-scale if you have to *pay* to drop off *fuel* . Also, the idea that energy from waste emits less CO2 than gas generators is frankly laughable. However, the gist of this is correct: It is better to burn than to bury waste. That part is correct even if the costs are much higher and it has *nothing* to do with emissions of methane which are so volatile that they just *never* accumulate in the atmosphere.
Great summary of facts. This video is full of so much misinformation.
@@rb8049 i find these cnbc vignets to be propaganda more often than not.
This is cnbc afterall
Building a new Nuclear power plant is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity in the US and EU! China and some other countries with lower labor costs, less public opposition and fewer regulatory hassles are still building new Nuclear capacity. In the US and EU except France we are unlikely to see more Nuclear built any time soon. And by the way Nuclear is a base load power that can't be quickly ramped up and down like natural gas plant or batteries 🔋 therefore they sell at a "loss". Nuclear power plant is a 50 year investment so they calculate LCOE (levelized cost of energy) and if it's not worth it they ask for incentives from the government.
Solar PV is one of the cheapest ways to generate electricity. On the country side it can be even more affordable since we can avoid costly grid upgrades by local production and storage.
Wind is only cheap at scale in desirable locations.
Hydro isn't pricey either but most suitable locations are already producing.
Lastly, efficiency improvements can be cheaper than adding new capacity :)
You should have a coal mine factory open to burning the chemicals that floats in the air
What is a coal mine factory?
WALL-e (Disney Character) will be happy about this.
There is an even better way to do this by raising the temperature up to 4,000 degrees creating syngas which can be converted to all kinds of useful energy.
Check out the Fast-OX gasification system from Sierra Energy. It is a closed system and does not emit any pollution.
Every financial goal requires patience, dedication and consistent spirit knowing that investment is currently the most lucrative business in the world, both stocks, real estate and bitcoin shares are really positively changing people's lives.
Poor orientation has cause some failure in forex trade
I've seen lot of good
reviews about her. please how do i get in touch with her?
Who could this be? Everybody speaks about her, I think am interested how can i reach her
And Amazon says they are carbon zero …. All that Trash has cardboard, Plastic , Aluminium, Wood , etc. All recyclable…. Yet they choose to burn 🔥….. Insane
use clothes lines for wet laundry, refill same five gallon bucket for water free laundry soap,
Singapore already did that, and why we are not studying from them.