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Trash-To-Ethanol Plan Begs Questions
By Mr Ethanol | June 16, 2008
Gary Post Tribune:
Garbage-to-ethanol has been touted as the alternative to landfills, to foreign oil, the solution to global warming and the answer for municipalities fearful of going broke under new state caps on property taxes.
But can it deliver on those expectations? Does it offer answers to not just Lake County’s, but the nation’s, waste, fuel and global warming dilemmas?
The answers are mixed and to a large extent unanswered.
Lake County residents produce about 2,000 tons of garbage each day. Every day.
That garbage has to go somewhere, and right now, about 80 percent of it goes to the Newton County Landfill Partnership, a 590-acre landfill between Morocco and Mount Ayr, about an hour and a half from most Lake County residents.
The hundreds of trucks a day carrying Lake County garbage to Newton County burn diesel fuel, which is close to $5 a gallon.
A 2007 study by the University of Toronto and Michigan State University found that, in terms of reducing the greenhouse gases that lead to global warming, the best thing to do with garbage is to bury it and capture the gases given off to produce electricity.
“The idea is, if you just landfill it, then it’s bad for the greenhouse gas. … But if you take the (methane gas) and use it for electricity, that’s good because it replaces coal,” said Satish Joshi, an MSU professor and co-author of the study.
The Newton County landfill is pursuing plans to convert methane into electricity.
Joshi’s study found that replacing electricity from coal with electricity from landfills would result in 21 times less carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere than an equivalent amount of garbage converted to ethanol and burned instead of gasoline. Read more.
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New Way Of Making Easy Money Online
June 16th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
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