[Gasification] Trash talk: the green versus the ugly - Ottawa Citizen - 2006.10.06

[Mike Weaver]

While Toronto irritates Canada-U.S. relations by shipping garbage south,
Edmonton makes waste a successful 'green' business, writes Don Martin.

Byline: Don Martin

Starve a throwaway society of landfill space and the
desperation to dump triggers extreme measures.
Take Toronto. With most of its city dumps closed
and surrounding communities refusing the task of
trashmaster, its garbage is mostly exported to a
foreign country. A hundred gasoline-gulping rigs
cross the Detroit River into Michigan every day,
heading toward an ever-rising landmark of shame
known to fed-up locals as Mount Trashmore.
Then there's the Edmonton extreme. Just outside the
city limits it turns household waste into windrows of
brown odourless compost it sells to the public. And if
there's any doubt this made-in-Canada technology
has turned trash green, consider that it mines enough
methane gas from its rotting landfill to power the
entire waste treatment plant and more, all the while
negotiating with Europeans to sell lucrative
greenhouse gas-reduction credits on the stock market.
Such is the contrast between environmental
recklessness and responsibility. One city has created
a North American border irritant to bury a problem
nobody wants; the other has become a North
American leader to resolve a problem by creating a
benign product people buy.
The Edmonton Waste Management Centre is a
six-year-old technological marvel created by the
necessity of landfills nearing capacity while facing a
whole lot of not-in-my-backyard opposition to new
sites.
By far Canada's largest and most sophisticated
composting operation, it has extended the landfill's
lifespan by 20 years, while attracting copycat interest
from around the globe. Mongolian authorities, for
instance, seem fascinated by the concept.
It has become so acclaimed that Grade 4 science
students in the city examine it as part of their
curriculum and about 11,000 students per year fill the
lecture hall at the dump to learn how their trash
makes gardens grow better.
The $100-million Edmonton model is hardly rocket
science, though. Which makes you wonder why it
isn't the standard instead of the exception.
The public puts recyclables in a blue bag and the rest
of its trash in another. Garbage trucks empty the
regular waste onto the floor of a warehouse where
workers, who no matter how much they're paid earn
too little, sort through smelly rows to remove obvious
non-compostable material. Old shoes, bricks or car
batteries, for instance.
The approved mess is then mixed with raw human
sewage and injected into a giant rotating drum wide
enough to handle passing school buses. Just two days
later, moved along by the force of gravity as
pathogens are killed off in the 60 C heat generated by
this composting kickstart, a dark-brown, flaky,
bark-like substance showing a surprisingly advanced
state of decomposition spills out the other end.
Much scientific filtering, oxidizing and stirring
ensues -- inside for one month, outdoors for another
four months -- before 125,000 tonnes of dirt additive
per year is ready for sale to farmers, golf course
operators and gardeners.
What's this got to do with clean air or climate
change? Well, lots. Not only do you save truck
exhaust from the nine-hour return trip to the United
States for a one-minute cargo dump, but the city
started "mining" its landfill for methane gas and CO2
emissions in the early 1990s, greenhouse gases that
would otherwise have seeped into the atmosphere.
It drilled 70 wells 25 metres into the rotting heap and
tapped into enough gas to power a generator with the
capacity to light up 4,600 homes. And the captured
carbon dioxide has handed the facility a greenhouse
gas-emission credit of 60,000 tonnes per year, which
Edmonton is now negotiating for sale on the
fledgling carbon market in Europe.
Plans are also under way to start gasifying scrap
wood on site, which, if it works, would create even
more energy gases and generate more emission
credits while leaving just 10 per cent of the total
waste stream bound for the landfill.
"There's been a phenomenal shift in North American
Spotowski, a former trash collector who now serves
as the site's educational co-ordinator. "Saving the
environment is a hot topic. Composting has become a
very important process in preventing pollution and
using landfill methane to generate electricity almost
completes the waste-disposal cycle."
When it comes to living green in a chuck-it-out
society, made-in-Edmonton compost beats a rotten
mountain in Michigan on any garbage collection day.


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