What happens to the toxic byproduct from burning the waste?
How is the energy harnessed, stored and ultimately used?
Why aren’t more countries doing this? Limitations?
Thanks
In: Other
Garbage is essentially just very lousy fuel with a ton of water and pollutants. Setting up a proper waste plant can be a challenging engineering task, and the electricity production is not always so great. What is great about waste plants however is the amount of hot water you can produce from it, which is why countries with wide scale district heating are often very good at waste plants.
Toxins in waste can be of multiple sources. But if it’s biological or chemical then in most ways the burning removes the poisonous part. Things like heavy metals are of course still a problem, and but heavy metals gets collected in the ash leftover from burning the waste. So in a sense the waste plant also helps separate out toxins.
The energy is harnessed like any other powerplant, via good’ol boiling water to spin a turbine. However the electric efficiency is not very high due to the lower quality of the fuel, however you still get a lot of good quality hot water out of it, that countries with district heating can sell to consumers to heat their homes
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