Burn Baby Burn!

There is talk that Cleveland is getting a new plant that will burn the trash they collect and convert it into electricity. Of course there is a group fighting this saying it not good for the environment. Stated the closed site in Columbus. But the fact is the plant in Columbus burned everything and puffed toxic smoke into the air. This plant they are proposing to build with federal grants will protect the air. As many of the Europe sites are already.

So is burning trash bad? Well Earth 911  states that it is very clean combustion under very controlled conditions. The trash is sometimes burned just to make it a smaller amount. That the trash we produce is so large they need to make it smaller and many times burning some of our trash will help reduce the amount of trash in our landfills. Because burning 1,600 pounds of trash becomes 240 pounds of ash.

PLUS the fact on the same site I learned that Dayton; which is close to Columbus for non-Ohioans, has a plant that burns trash for energy. With no smoke!

 Britain is going to start using trash for energy on the Isle of Wight. Denmark has built what they call waste-to-energy plants. There is over 29 such plants, serving 98 municipalities in a country of 5.5 million people. With plans to build more (or have been built this was written in 2010).    Europe has over 400 waste to energy plants.

I agree that waste free would be the way to go, the end that is  we want to get to.  BUT we are no where near that. Not in the least.  So a trash burning plant that would produce electric is better than nothing.  Maybe even produce heat like in Europe. So if this country already has these sites that burn just to reduce the amount of trash for the land fill why not make them work for us.

I mean we really wanting  the future to look like  in Idiocracy? Really that was a horror story from the eco-friendly view.  Trash piled up everywhere and nothing growing? NOT  my idea of a future I would like to see.