When our waste breaks down in land fills, it generates large amounts of methane gas. Some of the newer landfill sites have been carefully designed to prevent leaching into the water table and to capture the methane gas generated. In Victoria (Australia) in 2004-5, 5.4 million tonnes of waste was recycled. This is a 7% increase from the previous year it showed recycling saved over 78 million gigajoules of energy, 52 GL of water and 4 million tonnes of greenhouse gasses. 55% of the total solid waste stream was recovered.

Germany has become the 18th country to join the international “Methane To Markets Partnership”, an initiative to turn the toxic greenhouse gas in the coalmining, landfill, agricultural, and oil and gas sectors into a clean energy source.

India wants industry to use waste-to-energy technologies to both generate electricity and help address waste disposal challenges in various core industries including pulp and paper industry, breweries, textile mills, rice mills and solvent extraction units.
The paper industry is eminently suited for power co-generation as 75-85% of energy is to heat the process and 15-25% as electrical power.

“The large quantity of wastewater generated in pulp and paper industry can be used for generating biogas which can be used to produce thermal energy electricity.”

And we can consider using other fuels as well as how far we transport things and whether the transport is efficient. The biggest initiatives here are alternative fuels such as harnessing solar and wind energy and also using fuels made from plants and other biological sources instead of fossil fuels. This is logical because fossil; fuels are just fossilised forests from the past.

Victoria’s (Australia) wind farms are saving more than 250,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year, according to an independent study. A typical 2 MW wind turbine reduces greenhouse emissions by about 6,000 tonnes per year, with 1,000 MW of installed wind able to displace around 600 GWh of brown coal generation per annum.

A meat works in Victoria, is investigating the use of animal fat from its abattoir operations for making biodiesel. The potential 10 ML of biodiesel a year would fuel the company’s own transport fleet, with the excess sold on the open market. In Australian biodiesel is being made from canola but sugar would be another good source.

In New Zealand biofuel is being made from algae grown in sewage ponds. This is important because a major obstacle to biodiesel is the fact that the same land used to grow biodiesel crops is also needed to grow food. We are NOT short of sewage.

Trading carbon is a sensible strategy so that people who do use large amounts of carbon based energy can pay other people who are growing trees. One of my clients has their own forestry project to enable their business to be carbon neutral.

At Enviro Action we donate a portion of all our income to Trees for Life to support them growing seedling native trees for farmers and other land owners to plant each year.

Technorati Tags: Jean Cannon, envirojean, alternative energy sources, using our wastes, wind farms, greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, ISO 14001

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