Green Greed is Good

Today being Earth Day, I had the pleasure (and/or annoyance) of having pretty much every e-mail in my inbox reference Earth Day in the subject line. Most of them were boring and standard ("Happy Earth Day," "Earth Day Resolutions," "Call Your Senator/Representative This Earth Day," or "It's Earth Day: Give Us Money!"), but one of them really stood out, and it was from one of my favorite daily newsletter senders: Urban Dictionary. Their tagline: "Green Greed."

Urban Dictionary defines Green Greed as "companies and people who don't care about the environment at all, except when it will make them money."

So that got me thinking: is green greed really that big of a problem? Sure, I won't pretend I'm not irked to see GM hopping on the green bandwagon (and making crazy money on it) after they spent 20 years convincing people to buy giant, unnecessary gas guzzling SUV's and after literally killing the electric car. But that fact of the matter is that with the help of GM, people will have more access to green transportation over the next few years then they would have if GM hadn't gotten on the bandwagon. At the end of the day, that's all that really matters right?

As I've said before, I do enjoy some things that aren't good for the environment, and it seems to me that the best way to make sure those things get greener, and the best way to make sure those greener versions get into the hands of ordinary 'Mericans, is to applaud green greed. That doesn't mean we need to forgive GM their sins, that we shouldn't take them to task for the problems they still have, or even that we need to be their #1 cheerleader. But as far as I am concerned, why companies go green is not nearly as important as that they do go green.

You know what -- I think that is my Earth Day resolution. To paraphrase the immortal Gordon Gekko: green greed is good -- just don't forget who you're dealing with.

Why You Should Burn Your Trash

I've felt strongly for some time now that the energy of the future was going to be waste (ie. trash). I was introduced to this theory through the peer reviewed scientific lens of Back to the Future (which also introduced me to the possibility of flying skateboards, more on that in another post).

In the film, Doc Brown's original fuel for his time traveling DeLorean is plutonium, whose hard to obtain nature lands Doc in a pretty sticky situation. At the end of the film however, after Doc goes to the future and refits his machine with a new fangled flux capacitor, all it takes to fuel the DeLorean are a few choice items he pulls out of Marty's trash can, replacing forever Docs reliance on dangerous, hard to obtain nuclear fuel. I find this fable sums up pretty well my own opinions on the subject: why should we deal with dangerous, dirty fuels when we have more than enough waste full of untapped energy to go around?

The answer of course is that while there are many theoretical options for tapping into that energy -- cellulosic ethanol, methane from landfills, thermal energy from compost heaps, algea biofuels, the list goes on -- we are simply not there yet. We currently do not have the technology to turn waste into fuel in a way that is both cost effective, non-toxic. According to an article in yesterdays New York Times however, the technology may finally be here to do just that. The most amazing thing about this new technology technology? It's not even a new technology at all.

The idea of burning garbage as fuel has been around for a long time, but in the modern era it can be traced back to the 1970's. The recently formed OPEC was driving energy prices up, and cities were running out of landfill space. This obvious set of problems spurred a few entrepreneurs to develop "garbage to energy" systems: these systems burned garbage to make steam, or ground it into fuel pellets. What seemed like a slam dunk however quickly turned into a big problem:

"Garbage to Energy Plants were expensive, and to finance them, cities signed (were asked to sign) long term contracts to deliver and pay for a guaranteed supply of garbage. If the city didn’t have enough garbage, it had to pay anyway. The incentive to recycle would be gone. Also, the energy calculations started with garbage = 0. But Garbage wasn’t worthless – it was full of stuff that could be reused and recycled. You could save more energy and other resources by recycling paper than by burning it, and then cutting trees to make new paper." (www.garbage.org).

Add in the fact that burning garbage releases hundreds of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, and by the 1980's the garbage burning movement was dead. After all, how could we possibly make up for all of these huge negatives?

According to The New York Times, Denmark, and several other forward thinking European countries including Germany and the Netherlands, have found a way:

"Far cleaner than conventional incinerators, this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity. Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago. In that time, such plants have become both the mainstay of garbage disposal and a crucial fuel source across Denmark, from wealthy exurbs like Horsholm to Copenhagen’s downtown area. Their use has not only reduced the country’s energy costs and reliance on oil and gas, but also benefited the environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide emissions... With all these innovations, Denmark now regards garbage as a clean alternative fuel rather than a smelly, unsightly problem."

Additionally, the creation of these plants has not led to a drop in the recycling rate of these countries, in spite of the fact that they currently have some of the highest recycling rates in the world. This may be attributed to the fact that in these countries local governments usually manage all trash collection, incinerators and recycling centers, and financial incentives ensure that recyclable materials are not burned. For example, communities may recycle free of charge, but must pay to have garbage incinerated. Turns out government incentives CAN be a good thing.

Is this really possible? Can Denmark really have found a way to create energy and divert trash from the landfill in a way that doesn't release toxic chemicals into the environment or decrease our recycling rate?

There are of course downsides to the program. While scrubbers do keep the most toxic substances out of the environment, there is still no way to properly dispose of them and they must be stored forever in a way similar to nuclear waste. And there is still the American public to consider -- after 30 years of being told we do not want any plants of this sort built, can we really be convinced that it is now a good idea? An interesting debate to be sure, but whether we decide to follow Denmark's lead or not, I am still waiting for my own trash fueled flux capacitor.

Image provided by Richard Berg