The country now has more than 1,000 waste-incinerating power stations, representing more than half the world’s waste power capacity, according to the Global Waste-to-Energy Research and Technology Council.
Whatever happened to that plasma incinerator I heard about in Stuff You Should Know. It sounded so promising.
What great news, the trash is just gone once you burn it and nobody has to think about that statement any further. One thing real quick: we don’t need clean air for anything, do we?
It is possible to burn waste and manage the pollution in at least somewhat safe manner. Finland and Sweden do it reasonably well with high temperature furnaces and filtering the exhaust gases either with mechanical filter or trough water. That also (at least as far as I know) requires that you sort out the waste and don’t burn stuff like electronics, metals and some other crap which can be effectively recycled and manage whatever remains properly.
So, it’s possible, but I have absolutely no idea if China does that properly.
Finland and Sweden do it reasonably well with high temperature furnaces and filtering the exhaust gases … with water
That’s just a fancy bubbler (bong) 😂
Do not drink the forbidden bong water.
There are live pollution maps of the world if you need an idea if China does that properly but I‘ll have to warn you that you‘ll most likely be disappointed and somewhat terrified.
I meant that I don’t know if these trash incinerators are managed properly. I’m well aware that in general there’s a crapload of unmanaged pollution and a ton of other problems around, but like every other country China is slowly improving their stuff so it’s not impossible that new plants would be up to modern standards.
Some plants do, low bidders who get the government contracts don’t have much of an incentive though.
Oh man, too bad most of our trash is digital now. The dumpster that is now called X would power the world for decades.
Where do you think Musk got his inspiration for his SuPErApP from?
There’s plenty of waste in the world. They won’t help
But would the energy recovered from using it as fuel be more than the energy required to ship it to China?
The ships sending us Chinese goods have to return to China anyway. That’s why everyone was sending China their plastic to be “recycled”. Might as well just incinerate it.
That’s a good question, but, would the waste then be properly disposed of? It may not be incredibly efficient right now, but less trash is less trash, right?
