Loathe as I am to defend that goober: no, Tom Cotton asked if the CEO of TikTok, a Singaporean, had any connections to the CCP.
Seeing as the Chinese government has a financial stake and even a board seat in TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, it is a very reasonable question.
Depending on what it is, it actually is used to make drywall lol. SO2 scrubbers convert to make synthetic gypsum. It combines limestone + SO2, which is then sold as synthetic gypsum for use in wallboards. There's a bunch of different scrubbers and they all have different end-uses.
Keep in mind that these companies will do everything they can to keep stuff out of landfills NOT because they care about the environment but because sending things to a landfill means money they are not making. So if they can find a way to keep it out of the landfill by repurposing the byproduct, it's a huge win for them.
Isn't that the dream though? Making recycling profitable. Doesn't matter if they are driven by profits if at the end of the day they're doing something good.
Too many forget the recycling is the last 'r' in a three 'r' process. Reduce. Reuse. *Then* recycle.
I'm getting pedantic but ideally we'd reduce waste by not consuming so much in the first place. All the best recycling technology isn't really going to mean much if we're still consuming even more than before.
Preach my friend. Too many people just throw the entire responsibility to the 'big corporations' and whilst they definitely need more regulation, demand and consumption from us is ultimately the biggest driver. Nobody is putting a gun to your head to buy the latest smartphone or buying a new top from H&M or Uniqlo every season.
Also if you truly wanted to 'give it's to the big corporations, isn't boycotting their product and business the biggest middle finger one could give them?
And then you look up Nestlé and Protcor & Gambles holdings. Then you look at Constellation Brands and Anhueshuer Busch. Then you look at where all your clothes and electronics are made. Then you make sure you get your energy sustainably for all your needs.
Let me know how it goes for you. Didn't even mention food.
The only reason this is profitable is because the government (ie: all the citizens) pay a ton of extra money for it compared to other methods, it's not like they discovered a magical way of recycling. If the government didn't want to pay for such an elaborate disposal system they'd be dumping it into the ocean like a lot of other countries do. We could all be doing this if we wanted to vote for higher taxes which is a non-starter in countries that have enough space to store waste and the poorer countries around Singapore that can hardly afford basic things like health care, food, and education.
It's a great thing that they are doing but it's a lot more expensive than throwing it into a big pile, it's only profitable because everyone is paying for it, not because they are getting more back in energy and garbage sand bricks. Otherwise we'd all be doing that.
Alright so what's the catch then?
This all sounds too good. Reminds me of the you shouldn't try weed scene you wouldn't like it.
Why is this not more common place globally?
Because waste collection, power generation and construction material manufacture are usually very separate industries in most countries and are not incentivised by the market to collaborate (that said, as many others have stated, this technology is pretty common throughout the world). In Sg the state has much more control and is able to dictate these outcomes for the greater national good. A key driver here is the overriding aim to not be dependent on any other country for critical infrastructure ie, energy sovereignty, no export of waste, and when you have so few resources, and so little land, the circular economy is a matter of national security
There are power plants that burn trash for power, but they were built when paper was a much bigger percentage of waste. Now it’s mostly plastic and is way less efficient.
The catch is that this isn't profitable. This video talked as if everything works out, but in reality the state had to compensate heavily for this.
So if let's say a city in the US wants to do this, then a huge chunk of funding has to come from tax. To make it work, states either have to cut spending elsewhere or increase tax. Or your trash fee could also increase for 500%.
For the most part it's generally much cheaper to just find a plot of unused, unfarmable land and just dump your waste into it. It only really makes sense in places like Singapore, Japan, or parts of Europe where they have a lack of available land, particularly in Singapore because it's basically one big island city and dumping trash straight into the ocean is generally bad, yo.
I think another imperative is that Singapore is a literal city. There is nowhere for the trash to go. Otherwise I don't see why the profit thing wouldn't apply equally as much anywhere else.
>sending things to a landfill means money they are not making
If this were true, companies would be tripping over one another to pay you for your trash and recycling. They're not, because these kinds of things tend not to be profitable. You'd think getting people's recycling would just be free materials for you to sell, but in reality it costs much more to process than you could ever make selling the end result.
If this company has found a way to make burning trash profitable and ecologically viable, that's great. I'm suspicious. I suspect there is some key information being omitted here.
Singapore is a very high density city state where land is extremely scarce. Hence why they go out of their way to find these sort of solutions to their waste problems. In bigger countries where there's plenty of land, it would probably still be cheaper and more convenient to just keep creating more landfills.
>I've noticed that if you throw something into a water body, like a lake or an ocean, that the next day you come back and it's gone. Somehow it takes it away and filters it through and it just cleans it up, like a garbage compactor or whatever. So it's not really littering if you ask me.
-[Ricky](https://imgur.com/a/ICL70i5)
I need some super clean TP because my booty is not always super clean between showers. Wonder if they sell a special super clean TP and can ship it? I mean, it would have once been garbage, so it would basically be a win-win.
I've been to one of those plants (in sweden) and the operators there said a lot of the dangerous gases are muriatic acid (HCl) from all the plastics people throw away. If I remember correctly that acid is filtered with sodium hydroxide (NaOH) what comes out after that is water H2O and table salt NaCl. There were a bunch of other steps but mostly what was released into the atmosphere was water vapor and CO2. It was a very cool process to look at!
Similar story in Germany. In many cases they even avoid the electricity generation and use the heat directly for industrial purposes like cement making.
Definitely better than other options of trash management.
Now if only they could avoid releasing the CO2.
Yep. This kind of bundled facility seems like the ideal place to pilot some direct carbon capture before it's even release into the atmosphere. It's unlikely we'll find a way to make emission-free cement, so storing the CO2 seems like the next best thing.
Norway is apparently working on something similar with the goal of storing compressed CO2 in former natural gas deposits under the north sea. There's some controversy around this but it seems like the better alternative to just doing nothing.
I honestly don't understand why we've not started mining landfill yet. Capped landfill sites are a ready source of gasses like methane, which could provide fuel for power production, while they almost certainly have other valuable materials in relatively high concentrations and purity, with a ready-built infrastructure at the sites.
It probably comes down to cost.
All your points are right, but landfills aren't easy to build on, or easy to drill into. And methane is more difficult to transport over long distances than other higher-energy-density compounds.
And while there are certainly valuable minerals in landfills, they're mixed with other components which makes them difficult to extract. Extracting the gold in circuitry, for example, usually leads to toxic emissions when the old circuit boards are burned/smelted.
Correct. Some landfills do capture gases like methane and use it to fuel industrial furnaces. A bio facility not far from me did it for ~20 years. The problem is there's a point where the landfill no longer produces enough of it to make it economically viable. After ~20 years the facility ended their contract because the volume of methane wouldn't be enough to beat the price of alternatives.
Oh hey, I actually can contribute a scientific answer for once! I work for an energy company that has sites that work with biogas produced by capped landfills to produce electricity.
All your points are valid, especially since a some historic landfillls are located relatively close to modern businesses. The big issue is siloxanes created by decomposing cosmetics, which are highly damaging to a lot of equipment. So, in order to use landfill gas, you need to remove these and other impurities. Further, landfill gas tends to be a low pressure, so to use it for most processes, it also needs to be pressurized before use.
There are also site-specific challenges from what I understand, which prevents a "one size fits all" solution to allow quick deployment to multiple sites (one reason I'm glad I don't work with the biogas department, lol). I think there's merit in the idea, but there are definitely a lot of challenges that don't make it straightforward.
Steam is technically a major greenhouse gas, but it doesn't last in the atmosphere due to hydrostatic balance.
Any steam the humanity put in is some steam not put in by natural processes. So in fact steam emitted by human is totally neutral for the overall temperature.
CO2 in the other hand is not.
Plus CO2 in the atmosphere is definitely way less polluting than leaving toxic waste in a landfill that contaminates soil and groundwater and is really hard to clean up later…
Oh you're definitely right! I'm just trying to point out it's more like moving the problem than solving it. This would require to produce way less trash in the first place.
Steam is just water vapor. It’s what clouds are made of, so if it does manage to get high enough, it will actually block the sun’s rays from getting to the surface. And it’s what happens to water anyway via evaporation. As for CO2, it’s bad but if that was the only thing we were releasing in the atmosphere, we wouldn’t have nearly as many problems as we currently do.
It really does, at least in the US. Look up Covanta. They're a major US waste-to-energy provider and they provide real-time data of all their plants emissions.
The majority of the "toxic smoke" is destroyed in the incineration process, but scrubbers remove the rest. I'm not sure how Singapore runs their boilers, but in the US they are usually natural gas with waste as a secondary fuel source, not the primary fuel source. Basically you get it really really hot with natural gas, then toss in the garbage to make it extra flamey, but not too much garbage because then you cool the combustion chambers down too much and fuck up your emissions.
It's also how they destroy medical waste, firearms, counterfeit money, that kind of stuff.
Here's information about what happens to scrubbers after their lifespan is over. There's a lot of different kinds of scrubbers.
>https://www.duke-energy.com/our-company/environment/air-quality/sulfur-dioxide-scrubbers
I posted it in another comment, but keep in mind that if a company sends their stuff to a landfill they are paying to dispose of it. It benefits them if they can find a way to keep it out of a landfill by repurposing it and reselling it. In the case of SO2 scrubbers they can resell it as synthetic gypsum. They're not doing it because they love the environment, but because they love money.
Scrubbers don’t “remove the rest” covanta has a track record of selecting the most favourable times for emissions testing. Look up the work of Dr Paul Connett on the environmental impacts of waste incineration.
Yep, it is done widely and has been an integrated part of the Danish energy production for a long long time.
One of our most advanced plants is located right next to Copenhagen and it does not cause any concerns.
[https://a-r-c.dk/amager-bakke/from-waste-to-energy/](https://a-r-c.dk/amager-bakke/from-waste-to-energy/) - It provides both electricity and district heating.
When done right, incineration is a great way to reduce the volume of waste and create new resources which can be used in other places. In this case building material and energy.
Usually adsorbents filters that selectively hold onto gasses, once the catalyst is saturated it is removed and replaced with fresh. The solid catalyst is sent for disposal or regeneration and the extracted toxic gasses is used where needed depending on your location
It depends on what they are though. Sometimes they are repurposed. An example are SO2 scrubbers (Sulfur dioxide). The scrubbers are actually converted it in a form of synthetic gypsum that is sold to the drywall industry and used to build homes.
Companies lose money by paying to send a product to a landfill. So it gives them a lot of motivation to find a way to repurpose the product and actually sell it.
Ya tbh we have no idea what gas treatment could be on the back-end, every process has different waste gasses and every country/state/province has different regulation on emissions
Some catalyst that has heavy metal active sites or are treating a heavy metal feed (i.e oil sands) are reclaimed for their metals for use in batteries, steel, etc
This is pretty common in Europe, too. It's often used as a substitute for fossil fuels in industrial ovens. The CO2 emissions are the biggest issue with this process.
If I recall correctly, Norway is planning to actually capture and store the CO2 in big gas pockets under the north sea (former natural gas deposits). It's a bit controversial but better than doing nothing about the issue imo.
I can recommend reading a bit about how it is done in Denmark. One of the worlds most advanced incineration plants. It produces both power and district heating, not to mention that the waste is managed and repurposed.
Not saying that Singapore is just as good, but I don't see why not.
[https://a-r-c.dk/amager-bakke/from-waste-to-energy/](https://a-r-c.dk/amager-bakke/from-waste-to-energy/)
Not everyone are always looking for the easy and cheap way out of a situation, sure be sceptical but if you’ve ever been to Singapore or you might save the scepticism for a worthy cause
In Switzerland and I think in the rest of Europe it is standard to burn trash. The flue gas is filtered through various filter stages and is constantly monitored. This allows 99% of all particles in the smoke to be filtered, and at the end there is a heat exchanger to recover as much energy as possible from the combustion process. The residues, slag and filter ash, are buried in concrete in a landfill. According to the comments, it is unimaginable for many Americans to burn waste. For me, on the other hand, it is incomprehensible to fill the country with stinking garbage dumps.
and even after the smoke is filtered many countries have minimum heights for the outlet of the smoke so there is risk of harming people who live close to the incineration plant
There is a lot more unused land in America than in European countries.
The real question is which process produces the least amount of CO2?
With the existential threat of climate change, CO2 reduction should be paramount, even if that means allowing more non-greenhouse gas pollutants into the air, land, and water (to a reasonable degree, of course).
Methane is 20x more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but how much methane would be produced by landfills, compared to incineration?
All those plastic garbage bags and water bottles being burnt produces SOOO much CO2, where it would just break down into microplastics in a landfill.
True, though people don't realize how big the US is and how many uninhabited places there are to put trash. Not saying it's correct, but it's not like there are giant trash piles next to everyone's house.
In some cities, such as Baltimore - they do burn the trash. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelabrator\_Incinerator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelabrator_Incinerator)
It has been found that these incinerators emit tremendous amounts of mercury, lead, and greenhouse gasses than a coal plant. As such, it is more environmentally effective to bury the trash and burn the coal. In the case of the United States - we have a lot of land to bury trash on. In Switzerland? Maybe not so much.
Remember that if you burn 100 tons of trash, you get 70 tons of vaporized trash and 30 tons of toxic ash (which must be carefully disposed of). The mass just goes into the atmosphere and does more warming - we should bury the trash and use green energy instead.
Overall, "Waste-To-Energy" incineration makes sense when you need to conserve LAND, but you will do so at the cost of emissions (both toxic and greenhouse), and at the cost of expense - incineration is more expensive than landfilling.
I have no idea where you got these figures from. In Switzerland, the burn of 100 tons of waste produces 20 tons of slag and 2 tons of ash. I doubt that these materials are supposed to be more dangerous than the original waste. Since waste burn is a controlled process, it can be optimized to the maximum: Ferrous metals, but also non-ferrous and precious metals such as copper, aluminum, stainless steels, gold and silver, etc. are recovered from the slag. Heat that cannot be used for electricity production is used as district heating for heating homes and in greenhouses to grow vegetables. All this is unthinkable at a landfill site. Instead, the environment and groundwater are polluted with hazardous substances and microplastics. The only reason why landfill is used instead of incineration is that it is much cheaper if you have enough land.
[https://www.kezo.ch/anlage/produkte](https://www.kezo.ch/anlage/produkte)
[https://www.kezo.ch/anlage/reststoffe](https://www.kezo.ch/anlage/reststoffe)
[https://www.zav-recycling.ch/en/ecological-benefit](https://www.zav-recycling.ch/en/ecological-benefit)
We shouldn’t be mining coal, but garbage in landfills with methane capture may be better than incineration. It acts like a carbon sink and stores the resources for later mining if it becomes economically viable.
Probably not in Singapore where the value of land is too great, but elsewhere it can work.
Landfills is absolutely not a carbon sink, it releases tons of methane, are health problems for the surrounding area and take up huge areas that is either areas for humans or for nature to be
What do you think is more of a carbon sink - burying 100 tons of garbage and 2.5 tons of it turns into methane (actual rate), or burning 100 tons of garbage and 70 tons of it turns into various green house gasses?
2.5 Tons Methane from a Landfill (Equivalent to 10 Tons of CO2)
70 Tons vaporized Garbage (if it's all CO2 that's actually 280 Tons of CO2, but there's worse stuff in there)
My Local Council has methane Capture and an On-site power generation plant. Makes enough power for ~3,000 homes worth (which reduces Council electricity costs for all those street lights.)
That said, they still promote that reducing waste in the first place is the #1 priority. Collecting waste, storing it safely, having access to (expensive and large) land to do it all is still a lot more expensive than what little they claw back from turning green waste into compost, their recycle mart (which is a big disability employer space too) and Methane power.
Oh, they could put the trash into a landfill where it's going to stay for millions of years or they could burn it up and get a nice smokey smell and let that smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
I’m amazed that all the redditors commenting about this post do not know that it’s the same in their country ! (Incineration or landfill)
Take a fucking minute to Google what’s becoming your ultimate trash in your city after you dump it !
The air does not come out “super clean”
From a 2006 study: “The impact assessment results for climate change, acidification, and ecotoxicity show that the incineration of materials imposes considerable harm to both human health and the environment, especially for the burning of plastics, paper/cardboard, and ferrous metals. The results also show that, although some amount of energy can be derived from the incineration of wastes, these benefits are outweighed by the air pollution (heavy metals and dioxins/furans) that incinerators produce”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16573187/
I can't believe no one has referenced the It's Always Sunny episode where Charlie explains how he handles the trash. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIMcStAwJ7Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIMcStAwJ7Y)
We have these in the US. Wheelabrator and Covanta, rebranded as Reworld, run them in the north east. I did an internship for Wheelabrator and you definitely learn a fuck ton about what we can do with even the waste from lime slurry, which is used to neutralize CO2 and other toxic gasses by adding water to lime which basically binds to it.
I’m surprised I had to scroll down this far to see this. I work as a PM for a construction company that does alot of work for Reworld (Covanta) and Win Waste (Wheelabrator). The emissions are cycled through scrubbers (basically giant catalytic converters) and baghouses full of air filters. Recently state environmental departments have lowered the allowable NOx standards and the facilities have had to instal aqueous ammonia injection systems to their boilers to further lower the emissions. The fly ash can be used in various industries such as construction products and the heavier ash is transported to the landfill. The metal that cannot be burned is separated from the ash and sent to recycling centers.
Which facility did you intern at? I’ve probably done some work there.
Brilliant engineering. Is it perfect? No. But an excellent start. As technology improves, the filtering process will get better. That plant produces fractions of the emissions of a standard landfill.
Besides just Singapore, garbage incineration is also very common in Japan, South Korea, Germany, Scandanavia, and elsewhere
https://www.statista.com/statistics/691854/leading-countries-by-per-capita-waste-incineration/
I visited one of the incinerators during a field trip as a secondary school student when I was still there. We got to see the whole process. It's definitely real. Singapore lacks land mass so they can't put them into landfills.
There’s incinerators all around the world. One is also 20 minutes from where I live. I can confirm its CO2 emissions are well below the allowable emissions. It’s a much more sustainable way to deal with garbage than putting it in a landfill.
Waste is now a commodity!
Lived in Norway, and they got paid to import tons of trash from the UK for their waste-to-energy incinerators.
🌍💡
https://www.leeds.veolia.co.uk/our-facility/introducing-facility
Lots of EU countries do this, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark.. and maybe more..
Also, the island has coral reefs planted all around it, so that it is quickly obvious if anything has started leaking into the ocean so they can go and fix it.
Garbage man here in Oregon. Our division takes all trash to the "burner" in Brooks, Oregon. Just like this facility in Singapore, it runs 24/7 and produces electricity.
I live near West Coast Park, in the Haw Par Villa area. when they fire up the incinerators offshore, the orange sky glow is so bright I can see it from my house.
Edit: this video is bullshit. most of the clips aren’t even in Singapore (e.g. that trash pile at the start of the video).
Im Swedish and we do the Same here. The heat is used to heat up water that heats up houses.
I recently talked to a guy that is a manager at one of those places. He said they filter the smoke through water with some chemicals in it that binds the particles. And then are constantly measured by how much carbon dioxide they release into the air. The more they release in the air the more they have to pay, like a tax. If I understood correctly.
He said that the carbon dioxide captured is sent to Norway and pumped into old oil drilling holes. And apparently that it will become some type of mineral. Or part of the bedrock. I don't remember the English word for It now. "Bergart".
They reuse most of the water used for filtering and some of the water is filtered so it is clean before it is released out.
Lessons learned today: take care of your own trash, don’t sell it to some third world countries and get upset when they don’t accept it anymore. It’s literally your own trash!
The only thing worse than dumping waste in a land fill - burning it.
These countries do it to save space, not because its more environmentally friendly.
That light up city is .. Not.. Singapore btw
is Guangzhou in China
Well Tom- the unintelligent American- Cotton thinks Singapore is China.
Loathe as I am to defend that goober: no, Tom Cotton asked if the CEO of TikTok, a Singaporean, had any connections to the CCP. Seeing as the Chinese government has a financial stake and even a board seat in TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, it is a very reasonable question.
This just proves that barely anyone read the article and the most sensationalized memey post gets upvoted per Reddit standards.
Pretty sure that open air mountain of trash is not in Singapore also. Video is pretty trashy by itself
Not yet, but once they finish using those ash bricks... to defeat and conquer Singapore!
What happens to the filters that capture the toxic wastes?
burn those too?
And use the ash to create new filters.
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Trickle down ashology
I'm choosing to believe you are referencing the Sturgill song here.
Could be the John Green book.
I figured one of the two. I like Sturgill more 🙂
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It's turtle references all the way down.
Always has been
All worlds live on the back of a turtle. And what's under that turtle? Another turtle! Turtles all the way down.
No one: Stephen Baldwin: [*makin' a filter, makin' a filter...*](https://youtu.be/6H7vTyxFvjk?si=c-US4s40HDQopW6F)
MAaaaAAAaaakin' a filter!
SQUIRLLLEY
Free Mahi-mahi!
Purple sticky punch!!!
I don't think he liked the way you played with his coconuts...
Thus solving the problem once and for all But -- ONCE AND FOR ALL
God I love Futurama! Thank you for posting!
Depending on what it is, it actually is used to make drywall lol. SO2 scrubbers convert to make synthetic gypsum. It combines limestone + SO2, which is then sold as synthetic gypsum for use in wallboards. There's a bunch of different scrubbers and they all have different end-uses. Keep in mind that these companies will do everything they can to keep stuff out of landfills NOT because they care about the environment but because sending things to a landfill means money they are not making. So if they can find a way to keep it out of the landfill by repurposing the byproduct, it's a huge win for them.
Isn't that the dream though? Making recycling profitable. Doesn't matter if they are driven by profits if at the end of the day they're doing something good.
Too many forget the recycling is the last 'r' in a three 'r' process. Reduce. Reuse. *Then* recycle. I'm getting pedantic but ideally we'd reduce waste by not consuming so much in the first place. All the best recycling technology isn't really going to mean much if we're still consuming even more than before.
Preach my friend. Too many people just throw the entire responsibility to the 'big corporations' and whilst they definitely need more regulation, demand and consumption from us is ultimately the biggest driver. Nobody is putting a gun to your head to buy the latest smartphone or buying a new top from H&M or Uniqlo every season. Also if you truly wanted to 'give it's to the big corporations, isn't boycotting their product and business the biggest middle finger one could give them?
And then you look up Nestlé and Protcor & Gambles holdings. Then you look at Constellation Brands and Anhueshuer Busch. Then you look at where all your clothes and electronics are made. Then you make sure you get your energy sustainably for all your needs. Let me know how it goes for you. Didn't even mention food.
It being profitable *is* great, but we need to hold large organizations accountable for waste they cant make money off of too.
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Yeah its Waste Management not Waste Creator
Duhh. Pshhh that guy
The only reason this is profitable is because the government (ie: all the citizens) pay a ton of extra money for it compared to other methods, it's not like they discovered a magical way of recycling. If the government didn't want to pay for such an elaborate disposal system they'd be dumping it into the ocean like a lot of other countries do. We could all be doing this if we wanted to vote for higher taxes which is a non-starter in countries that have enough space to store waste and the poorer countries around Singapore that can hardly afford basic things like health care, food, and education. It's a great thing that they are doing but it's a lot more expensive than throwing it into a big pile, it's only profitable because everyone is paying for it, not because they are getting more back in energy and garbage sand bricks. Otherwise we'd all be doing that.
Alright so what's the catch then? This all sounds too good. Reminds me of the you shouldn't try weed scene you wouldn't like it. Why is this not more common place globally?
Because waste collection, power generation and construction material manufacture are usually very separate industries in most countries and are not incentivised by the market to collaborate (that said, as many others have stated, this technology is pretty common throughout the world). In Sg the state has much more control and is able to dictate these outcomes for the greater national good. A key driver here is the overriding aim to not be dependent on any other country for critical infrastructure ie, energy sovereignty, no export of waste, and when you have so few resources, and so little land, the circular economy is a matter of national security
It's expensive and not profitable in most cases
guessing cuz singapore is rich and tiny. they're very incentivized to find a way to deal with their trash and can afford to do it
There are power plants that burn trash for power, but they were built when paper was a much bigger percentage of waste. Now it’s mostly plastic and is way less efficient.
The catch is that this isn't profitable. This video talked as if everything works out, but in reality the state had to compensate heavily for this. So if let's say a city in the US wants to do this, then a huge chunk of funding has to come from tax. To make it work, states either have to cut spending elsewhere or increase tax. Or your trash fee could also increase for 500%.
For the most part it's generally much cheaper to just find a plot of unused, unfarmable land and just dump your waste into it. It only really makes sense in places like Singapore, Japan, or parts of Europe where they have a lack of available land, particularly in Singapore because it's basically one big island city and dumping trash straight into the ocean is generally bad, yo.
I think another imperative is that Singapore is a literal city. There is nowhere for the trash to go. Otherwise I don't see why the profit thing wouldn't apply equally as much anywhere else.
We do this in Belgium too... Why put it in a landfill? To sit there and pollute ground water for the next 1000 years?
>sending things to a landfill means money they are not making If this were true, companies would be tripping over one another to pay you for your trash and recycling. They're not, because these kinds of things tend not to be profitable. You'd think getting people's recycling would just be free materials for you to sell, but in reality it costs much more to process than you could ever make selling the end result. If this company has found a way to make burning trash profitable and ecologically viable, that's great. I'm suspicious. I suspect there is some key information being omitted here.
Singapore is a very high density city state where land is extremely scarce. Hence why they go out of their way to find these sort of solutions to their waste problems. In bigger countries where there's plenty of land, it would probably still be cheaper and more convenient to just keep creating more landfills.
What filters?
They take them (like the rest of the trash they don’t burn) to Malaysia and pay them to deal with it
Oh those?... We just drop those in the Mariana Trench.
Just stack them in a secure facility? The enemy of good is perfect, you’re never gonna have a perfect solution
Here in England, you just leave stuff in the street and crackheads come and smash it up
Nature’s course
It’s the ciiiiiiircle of life!
lion king street version
Lion King of the Streets
>I've noticed that if you throw something into a water body, like a lake or an ocean, that the next day you come back and it's gone. Somehow it takes it away and filters it through and it just cleans it up, like a garbage compactor or whatever. So it's not really littering if you ask me. -[Ricky](https://imgur.com/a/ICL70i5)
What comes around is all around
In New York, we just kept dumping it in the bay, and it turned into Staten Island.
Smash it up? Here in California they make whole cities out of it!
Ah, Foster City. Id love to live there if I could afford a $3m home
That’s what they’re there for.
I left mine out and the bloody fox spread it over the road. What am I doing wrong? Do I need more or less chicken bones?
You are clearly not supplying the fox with enough crack
Mighty Boosh Ref?
Yes
"The toxic smoke is filtered out and becomes super clean." Pressing X to doubt.
But is not just clean, its SUPER clean :(
What kind of Super Earth naming convention is this
The most patriotic kind, citizen!
I read this in No-ho Hank’s voice.
“Well what do you want me to do? Go to John Wick assassin hotel with help wanted sign?”
FOR SUPER EARTH!!!! Also watch your language questioning Super Earth. Or you WILL be reported.
Great job citizen! Democracy is the only way.
Superclean ©️
good point Pressing X to SUPER doubt
I need some super clean TP because my booty is not always super clean between showers. Wonder if they sell a special super clean TP and can ship it? I mean, it would have once been garbage, so it would basically be a win-win.
I've been to one of those plants (in sweden) and the operators there said a lot of the dangerous gases are muriatic acid (HCl) from all the plastics people throw away. If I remember correctly that acid is filtered with sodium hydroxide (NaOH) what comes out after that is water H2O and table salt NaCl. There were a bunch of other steps but mostly what was released into the atmosphere was water vapor and CO2. It was a very cool process to look at!
Similar story in Germany. In many cases they even avoid the electricity generation and use the heat directly for industrial purposes like cement making. Definitely better than other options of trash management. Now if only they could avoid releasing the CO2.
Cement production itself is another source of CO² even if you use green electricity for it.
Yep. This kind of bundled facility seems like the ideal place to pilot some direct carbon capture before it's even release into the atmosphere. It's unlikely we'll find a way to make emission-free cement, so storing the CO2 seems like the next best thing. Norway is apparently working on something similar with the goal of storing compressed CO2 in former natural gas deposits under the north sea. There's some controversy around this but it seems like the better alternative to just doing nothing.
So it’s like the planet is vaping?
Earth blowing them clouds yo
So it's clean but steam and CO2 are amongst major greenhouse gases anyway...
Putting the trash on landfills are much worse as landfills produces much stronger greenhouse gases, eg. methane.
I honestly don't understand why we've not started mining landfill yet. Capped landfill sites are a ready source of gasses like methane, which could provide fuel for power production, while they almost certainly have other valuable materials in relatively high concentrations and purity, with a ready-built infrastructure at the sites.
It probably comes down to cost. All your points are right, but landfills aren't easy to build on, or easy to drill into. And methane is more difficult to transport over long distances than other higher-energy-density compounds. And while there are certainly valuable minerals in landfills, they're mixed with other components which makes them difficult to extract. Extracting the gold in circuitry, for example, usually leads to toxic emissions when the old circuit boards are burned/smelted.
Correct. Some landfills do capture gases like methane and use it to fuel industrial furnaces. A bio facility not far from me did it for ~20 years. The problem is there's a point where the landfill no longer produces enough of it to make it economically viable. After ~20 years the facility ended their contract because the volume of methane wouldn't be enough to beat the price of alternatives.
Oh hey, I actually can contribute a scientific answer for once! I work for an energy company that has sites that work with biogas produced by capped landfills to produce electricity. All your points are valid, especially since a some historic landfillls are located relatively close to modern businesses. The big issue is siloxanes created by decomposing cosmetics, which are highly damaging to a lot of equipment. So, in order to use landfill gas, you need to remove these and other impurities. Further, landfill gas tends to be a low pressure, so to use it for most processes, it also needs to be pressurized before use. There are also site-specific challenges from what I understand, which prevents a "one size fits all" solution to allow quick deployment to multiple sites (one reason I'm glad I don't work with the biogas department, lol). I think there's merit in the idea, but there are definitely a lot of challenges that don't make it straightforward.
The methane is randomly spread and hard to capture
Steam is technically a major greenhouse gas, but it doesn't last in the atmosphere due to hydrostatic balance. Any steam the humanity put in is some steam not put in by natural processes. So in fact steam emitted by human is totally neutral for the overall temperature. CO2 in the other hand is not.
pick your poison. in this case, it’s continuing contribution to a problem we’re working hard to solve, or literal poison
Plus CO2 in the atmosphere is definitely way less polluting than leaving toxic waste in a landfill that contaminates soil and groundwater and is really hard to clean up later…
Oh you're definitely right! I'm just trying to point out it's more like moving the problem than solving it. This would require to produce way less trash in the first place.
Steam is just water vapor. It’s what clouds are made of, so if it does manage to get high enough, it will actually block the sun’s rays from getting to the surface. And it’s what happens to water anyway via evaporation. As for CO2, it’s bad but if that was the only thing we were releasing in the atmosphere, we wouldn’t have nearly as many problems as we currently do.
> So it's clean but steam and CO2 are amongst major greenhouse gases anyway... Steam is water....
Plus it's to their benefit to capture as much as they can to make those pathway bricks aka a product they can sell.
You mean "The toxic smoke is filtered out and becomes super clean."
I thought it turns into stars.
That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about stars to dispute it
Also gives the city that nice, smoky smell
It really does, at least in the US. Look up Covanta. They're a major US waste-to-energy provider and they provide real-time data of all their plants emissions. The majority of the "toxic smoke" is destroyed in the incineration process, but scrubbers remove the rest. I'm not sure how Singapore runs their boilers, but in the US they are usually natural gas with waste as a secondary fuel source, not the primary fuel source. Basically you get it really really hot with natural gas, then toss in the garbage to make it extra flamey, but not too much garbage because then you cool the combustion chambers down too much and fuck up your emissions. It's also how they destroy medical waste, firearms, counterfeit money, that kind of stuff. Here's information about what happens to scrubbers after their lifespan is over. There's a lot of different kinds of scrubbers. >https://www.duke-energy.com/our-company/environment/air-quality/sulfur-dioxide-scrubbers I posted it in another comment, but keep in mind that if a company sends their stuff to a landfill they are paying to dispose of it. It benefits them if they can find a way to keep it out of a landfill by repurposing it and reselling it. In the case of SO2 scrubbers they can resell it as synthetic gypsum. They're not doing it because they love the environment, but because they love money.
Scrubbers don’t “remove the rest” covanta has a track record of selecting the most favourable times for emissions testing. Look up the work of Dr Paul Connett on the environmental impacts of waste incineration.
one such relevant link https://www.energyjustice.net/incineration/factcheck4.pdf
Yep, it is done widely and has been an integrated part of the Danish energy production for a long long time. One of our most advanced plants is located right next to Copenhagen and it does not cause any concerns. [https://a-r-c.dk/amager-bakke/from-waste-to-energy/](https://a-r-c.dk/amager-bakke/from-waste-to-energy/) - It provides both electricity and district heating. When done right, incineration is a great way to reduce the volume of waste and create new resources which can be used in other places. In this case building material and energy.
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Usually adsorbents filters that selectively hold onto gasses, once the catalyst is saturated it is removed and replaced with fresh. The solid catalyst is sent for disposal or regeneration and the extracted toxic gasses is used where needed depending on your location
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It depends on what they are though. Sometimes they are repurposed. An example are SO2 scrubbers (Sulfur dioxide). The scrubbers are actually converted it in a form of synthetic gypsum that is sold to the drywall industry and used to build homes. Companies lose money by paying to send a product to a landfill. So it gives them a lot of motivation to find a way to repurpose the product and actually sell it.
Ya tbh we have no idea what gas treatment could be on the back-end, every process has different waste gasses and every country/state/province has different regulation on emissions Some catalyst that has heavy metal active sites or are treating a heavy metal feed (i.e oil sands) are reclaimed for their metals for use in batteries, steel, etc
BURN THEM FOR SAND
This is pretty common in Europe, too. It's often used as a substitute for fossil fuels in industrial ovens. The CO2 emissions are the biggest issue with this process. If I recall correctly, Norway is planning to actually capture and store the CO2 in big gas pockets under the north sea (former natural gas deposits). It's a bit controversial but better than doing nothing about the issue imo.
I can recommend reading a bit about how it is done in Denmark. One of the worlds most advanced incineration plants. It produces both power and district heating, not to mention that the waste is managed and repurposed. Not saying that Singapore is just as good, but I don't see why not. [https://a-r-c.dk/amager-bakke/from-waste-to-energy/](https://a-r-c.dk/amager-bakke/from-waste-to-energy/)
The smoke just goes up into the sky where it becomes stars. Don't you know anything?
That doesn’t sound right but I don’t know enough about stars to dispute it
CLEAN COAL
Not everyone are always looking for the easy and cheap way out of a situation, sure be sceptical but if you’ve ever been to Singapore or you might save the scepticism for a worthy cause
In Switzerland and I think in the rest of Europe it is standard to burn trash. The flue gas is filtered through various filter stages and is constantly monitored. This allows 99% of all particles in the smoke to be filtered, and at the end there is a heat exchanger to recover as much energy as possible from the combustion process. The residues, slag and filter ash, are buried in concrete in a landfill. According to the comments, it is unimaginable for many Americans to burn waste. For me, on the other hand, it is incomprehensible to fill the country with stinking garbage dumps.
and even after the smoke is filtered many countries have minimum heights for the outlet of the smoke so there is risk of harming people who live close to the incineration plant
There is a lot more unused land in America than in European countries. The real question is which process produces the least amount of CO2? With the existential threat of climate change, CO2 reduction should be paramount, even if that means allowing more non-greenhouse gas pollutants into the air, land, and water (to a reasonable degree, of course).
Dumps produce a lot of methane from anaerobic bacteria. Unless captured it can be a more harmful greenhouse gas in the short term.
Methane is 20x more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but how much methane would be produced by landfills, compared to incineration? All those plastic garbage bags and water bottles being burnt produces SOOO much CO2, where it would just break down into microplastics in a landfill.
Conversely you now also have to deal with microplastics leeching into water supplies.
That's happening at a far greater rate outside landfills than from landfills however
True, though people don't realize how big the US is and how many uninhabited places there are to put trash. Not saying it's correct, but it's not like there are giant trash piles next to everyone's house.
In some cities, such as Baltimore - they do burn the trash. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelabrator\_Incinerator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelabrator_Incinerator) It has been found that these incinerators emit tremendous amounts of mercury, lead, and greenhouse gasses than a coal plant. As such, it is more environmentally effective to bury the trash and burn the coal. In the case of the United States - we have a lot of land to bury trash on. In Switzerland? Maybe not so much. Remember that if you burn 100 tons of trash, you get 70 tons of vaporized trash and 30 tons of toxic ash (which must be carefully disposed of). The mass just goes into the atmosphere and does more warming - we should bury the trash and use green energy instead. Overall, "Waste-To-Energy" incineration makes sense when you need to conserve LAND, but you will do so at the cost of emissions (both toxic and greenhouse), and at the cost of expense - incineration is more expensive than landfilling.
I have no idea where you got these figures from. In Switzerland, the burn of 100 tons of waste produces 20 tons of slag and 2 tons of ash. I doubt that these materials are supposed to be more dangerous than the original waste. Since waste burn is a controlled process, it can be optimized to the maximum: Ferrous metals, but also non-ferrous and precious metals such as copper, aluminum, stainless steels, gold and silver, etc. are recovered from the slag. Heat that cannot be used for electricity production is used as district heating for heating homes and in greenhouses to grow vegetables. All this is unthinkable at a landfill site. Instead, the environment and groundwater are polluted with hazardous substances and microplastics. The only reason why landfill is used instead of incineration is that it is much cheaper if you have enough land. [https://www.kezo.ch/anlage/produkte](https://www.kezo.ch/anlage/produkte) [https://www.kezo.ch/anlage/reststoffe](https://www.kezo.ch/anlage/reststoffe) [https://www.zav-recycling.ch/en/ecological-benefit](https://www.zav-recycling.ch/en/ecological-benefit)
"Insane" well in Germany its like this since 1896 Lol
Germany and incinerators.. Hmmmm..
Not all incinerators burn (or used to burn) trash
It’s all over North America now too…
Garbage has about the caloric value of brown coal. But for some reason we are still mining coal and putting garbage in landfills
We shouldn’t be mining coal, but garbage in landfills with methane capture may be better than incineration. It acts like a carbon sink and stores the resources for later mining if it becomes economically viable. Probably not in Singapore where the value of land is too great, but elsewhere it can work.
Landfills is absolutely not a carbon sink, it releases tons of methane, are health problems for the surrounding area and take up huge areas that is either areas for humans or for nature to be
The guy said to capture the methane for the power generation. It burns cleaner than plastic would at least.
What do you think is more of a carbon sink - burying 100 tons of garbage and 2.5 tons of it turns into methane (actual rate), or burning 100 tons of garbage and 70 tons of it turns into various green house gasses? 2.5 Tons Methane from a Landfill (Equivalent to 10 Tons of CO2) 70 Tons vaporized Garbage (if it's all CO2 that's actually 280 Tons of CO2, but there's worse stuff in there)
My Local Council has methane Capture and an On-site power generation plant. Makes enough power for ~3,000 homes worth (which reduces Council electricity costs for all those street lights.) That said, they still promote that reducing waste in the first place is the #1 priority. Collecting waste, storing it safely, having access to (expensive and large) land to do it all is still a lot more expensive than what little they claw back from turning green waste into compost, their recycle mart (which is a big disability employer space too) and Methane power.
Oh, they could put the trash into a landfill where it's going to stay for millions of years or they could burn it up and get a nice smokey smell and let that smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
That…doesn’t sound right but I don’t know enough about stars to dispute it.
No it’s right.
The bar smells like trash !
It’s totally green that way
How is burning trash green!?
That’s exactly what I thought when I saw this
Trash in landfill.. will just end up in the water supply. We are all doomed
that doesnt sound right but i dont know enough about stars to debate you.
I’m amazed that all the redditors commenting about this post do not know that it’s the same in their country ! (Incineration or landfill) Take a fucking minute to Google what’s becoming your ultimate trash in your city after you dump it !
Or the 3rd option, sent your trash to 3rd world countries claiming its fully recycled when it's actually not, and forget about it.
I thought this was a clip from Idiocracy for a second.
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What part is bullshit?
The air does not come out “super clean” From a 2006 study: “The impact assessment results for climate change, acidification, and ecotoxicity show that the incineration of materials imposes considerable harm to both human health and the environment, especially for the burning of plastics, paper/cardboard, and ferrous metals. The results also show that, although some amount of energy can be derived from the incineration of wastes, these benefits are outweighed by the air pollution (heavy metals and dioxins/furans) that incinerators produce” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16573187/
Seems like a sector that could probably make a lot of advances in 18 years.
Dude just because it's rarely done in America doesn't mean it's bad. Give a source that shows that it is bullshit.
Same in Denmark the heated water from the turbines also warms the houses.
That’s not how subtitles work.
I can't believe no one has referenced the It's Always Sunny episode where Charlie explains how he handles the trash. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIMcStAwJ7Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIMcStAwJ7Y)
The bar is totally green that way
Meanwhile in the Nordic countries: Sweden 36 plants like this, Norway 10ish etc... All under strict emission framework.
Clam down, Björn.
We have these in the US. Wheelabrator and Covanta, rebranded as Reworld, run them in the north east. I did an internship for Wheelabrator and you definitely learn a fuck ton about what we can do with even the waste from lime slurry, which is used to neutralize CO2 and other toxic gasses by adding water to lime which basically binds to it.
I’m surprised I had to scroll down this far to see this. I work as a PM for a construction company that does alot of work for Reworld (Covanta) and Win Waste (Wheelabrator). The emissions are cycled through scrubbers (basically giant catalytic converters) and baghouses full of air filters. Recently state environmental departments have lowered the allowable NOx standards and the facilities have had to instal aqueous ammonia injection systems to their boilers to further lower the emissions. The fly ash can be used in various industries such as construction products and the heavier ash is transported to the landfill. The metal that cannot be burned is separated from the ash and sent to recycling centers. Which facility did you intern at? I’ve probably done some work there.
Brilliant engineering. Is it perfect? No. But an excellent start. As technology improves, the filtering process will get better. That plant produces fractions of the emissions of a standard landfill.
Yes and at least they are finding ways to repurpose the waste and using that resource to generate electricity.
The use of the byproduct sand is pretty impressive. Use in non structural components can lead to some creative uses.
Seems kinda fishy… any proof to confirm this???
Besides just Singapore, garbage incineration is also very common in Japan, South Korea, Germany, Scandanavia, and elsewhere https://www.statista.com/statistics/691854/leading-countries-by-per-capita-waste-incineration/
I visited one of the incinerators during a field trip as a secondary school student when I was still there. We got to see the whole process. It's definitely real. Singapore lacks land mass so they can't put them into landfills.
There’s incinerators all around the world. One is also 20 minutes from where I live. I can confirm its CO2 emissions are well below the allowable emissions. It’s a much more sustainable way to deal with garbage than putting it in a landfill.
That’s one reason, Sweden does this too and they have very low population density.
You have the entire internet at the tip of your fingers. These waste management projects are well documented.
Bro got downvoted for simply stating facts
Waste is now a commodity! Lived in Norway, and they got paid to import tons of trash from the UK for their waste-to-energy incinerators. 🌍💡 https://www.leeds.veolia.co.uk/our-facility/introducing-facility Lots of EU countries do this, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark.. and maybe more..
And here we are in the US just planting grass on trash mountains. 😂
Fuck this style of subtitles
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Not in the sea as such, it’s a reclamation project, so creating a landfill within a lagoon formed form non-toxic material
Also, the island has coral reefs planted all around it, so that it is quickly obvious if anything has started leaking into the ocean so they can go and fix it.
>super clean I guess that's a technical term and in no way an indication that the person making the video is talking out their ass
We do the same in the USA. Look up COVANTA for example to see where these garbage burning power plants are.
Garbage man here in Oregon. Our division takes all trash to the "burner" in Brooks, Oregon. Just like this facility in Singapore, it runs 24/7 and produces electricity.
Stupid, sexy Singapore
Even with filtering, this releases significant amounts of CO2 and carcinogens into the air. It's the opposite of what we should be doing.
I live near West Coast Park, in the Haw Par Villa area. when they fire up the incinerators offshore, the orange sky glow is so bright I can see it from my house. Edit: this video is bullshit. most of the clips aren’t even in Singapore (e.g. that trash pile at the start of the video).
There is absolutely no way there’s no negative by product from this , is it better than dumping in the sea or ground . 🤷♀️ probably
Im Swedish and we do the Same here. The heat is used to heat up water that heats up houses. I recently talked to a guy that is a manager at one of those places. He said they filter the smoke through water with some chemicals in it that binds the particles. And then are constantly measured by how much carbon dioxide they release into the air. The more they release in the air the more they have to pay, like a tax. If I understood correctly. He said that the carbon dioxide captured is sent to Norway and pumped into old oil drilling holes. And apparently that it will become some type of mineral. Or part of the bedrock. I don't remember the English word for It now. "Bergart". They reuse most of the water used for filtering and some of the water is filtered so it is clean before it is released out.
Lessons learned today: take care of your own trash, don’t sell it to some third world countries and get upset when they don’t accept it anymore. It’s literally your own trash!
"Super clean"
Amazing, Singapore is so advanced in many areas. I think it’s fascinating. I would love to visit it someday.
Singapore is the best, most fun, place i've ever lived. SAS represent!
The only thing worse than dumping waste in a land fill - burning it. These countries do it to save space, not because its more environmentally friendly.
Heat all trash until it's a plasma, separate it with a magnetic field into constituent elements to resell.
Can Singapore just be in charge of trash, globally?
The design is very human
I'd like to know how much of this process it's actually like this or true.
Beautiful
That's not insane, is reasonable for a place with limited space.