FOUR MYTHS CONCERNING WASTE DISPOSAL. WHO BENEFITS FROM A LIE ABOUT BURNING SOLID WASTE?

Garbage recycling is a method that is not quite suitable for the national mentality, because you need to sort the garbage at the stage of its receipt at the landfill.

By the way, the «vaccination» of the propensity for separate collection of garbage, without which the profitability of processing becomes negative, took place on the fertile German, Swiss and Scandinavian land for 20–25 years. And in more temperamental south countries (France, Italy, countries of Eastern Europe) has not fully taken root and still.

According to current domestic Russian standards, the presence of organic waste in the solid waste (food, biowaste, etc.) automatically makes the entire batch of garbage «seeded with biological material», which entails control during processing, total disinfection, increased degrees of protection for workers and so on.

The most appropriate technological and economic way of processing is the incineration of solid waste. However, there are so many myths surrounding the topic of garbage burning that it is decidedly impossible to understand where reality is and where fiction is.

There are three sources of information on this issue (not only in Russia, but the same is in EU and US): officials, scientists, and environmentalists. The first of them think with their templates and usually live a separate reality. The second operate with formulas and links to scientific publications, but do not know how to count money. The latter are extremely emotional, but often ignorant in everything that relates to the technical and economic side of the matter.

Open at random the first three articles on the topic of waste disposal from the Internet. All of them are made like carbon copy. In the first part, they will tell you about a garbage disaster in the country and give statistics wandering from text to text (which, by the way, is almost never updated). Then comes the statement that «all over the world they have learned to make good money», and if «we had everything, as in Europe», we would completely forget about burning landfills every year. The following is a listing of what is wrong in the country. A set of complaints against the government is also commonplace: there is no legislative framework, there is no directing hand, no investment. Although, if everything is so simple and worthy, why do you need state support?

There are a bunch of recipes on the Internet on how to build your own small recycling plant for 50 thousand dollars. Have you heard much about such startups? A standard waste recycling plant costs around 20 billion rubles. So much, for example, Rostech invests in a plant under construction in Kazan. These include: technology, equipment, land, transport and utilities infrastructure, obtaining building permits, and so on.

A couple of years ago, people from RAO UES decided to take up the «rubbish business». The total investment in the Eco-System Group of Companies amounted to 16 billion rubles. The profitability of this area was estimated at 30 %, which, together with the required volumes of cash injections, make it unbearable and uninteresting for small and medium-sized businesses. Contrary to popular belief, in Europe, the construction of plants for the disposal and processing of solid waste is also mainly carried out by energy giants. For example, the German E.On is building (not the largest) factory in Cardiff.

The representative of the Eco-System Group of Companies, a former top manager of RAO UES of Ukraine Andrei Yakimchuk declared: it is unprofitable to burn solid waste, its heat transfer is lower than that of gas and coal, therefore all European plants are «subsidized». He is echoed by the Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology of Russia Rinat Gizatulin: it is inefficient to burn garbage, still one will have 40% of the garbage needed to be recycled.

Under the current tariff system, it is indeed simpler and more profitable to take garbage to landfills. For example, in the USA it costs $ 1000 per ton to dispose solid waste at a landfill. In Russia, the price of this service is in the range of 500-1000 rubles (6-12 USD). Thus, the state consciously supports companies serving landfills (often a very «shadowed» business). In this regard, the idea of banning incinerators looks like lobbying for this business. So, most likely, it is.

The main problem of the «unprofitability» of incineration plants in the Russian Federation is the traditional inertia and bureaucratization of the authorities (both political and technical).

In fact, any incinerator is a thermal power plant in which the solid waste is used as fuel «highlighted» with fuel oil or natural gas. As a result of the process of burning garbage, two main products are obtained: heat and / or electricity.

In the current situation, these resources can either be used autonomously (with the end consumer disconnected from the networks, which no one would dare to do), or sold to monopoly transporters. In the case of electricity, these are federal electricity company and its local divisions. In the case of heat, the relevant regional organizations. However, «outside» resources are not needed for the monopolists at the market price, and in the case of electricity, no less than 25–50 MW are needed.

Burning landfills accustomed citizens to the fact that the burning of garbage is an extremely harmful process for the environment. This myth is based on the traditional ignorance of modern engineering realities and the physics / chemistry of the combustion process. A typical example is the struggle of Greenpeace against the incinerator in St. Petersburg, where people earn on their own and others' ignorance.

This is far from the case. For a moment now existing R&D and technologies allow an efficient afterburning process of organic compounds in such a way that in the pipe section of the plant their concentration does not exceed the MPC – the maximum permissible concentration (and in some cases – the fraction of the MPC). Modern catalytic and plasma technologies can completely neutralize such emissions.

The ash remaining after burning can be successfully processed in various directions after metal extraction (by the way, a lot of metal can be extracted from solid waste). Vitrification of ash using plasma technology allows one to get artificial sand to fill the road surface. Ash can be used to obtain ceramic and concrete products for construction purposes – for the construction of technical structures, roads, etc.

Thus, waste from the burning of garbage can be completely reused and additional profit can be made.

In each region, foreign partners worked on the projects. In Novosibirsk – Koreans and Czechs, in Tatarstan and Vologda – Germans. Japanese-Swiss inventions Hitachi Zosen Inova were brought to the plant under construction in Kazan.

At the same time, in Russia and in the ex-USSR, a number of specialized industry institutes dealt with the problems of fire waste disposal. Of course, at present they mostly do not exist, or exist in the form of separate commercial organizations, often of a (very) small scale.

However, most of the developments in this area have been saved, there are opportunities for the development of instrumentation and automation and hardware design of the main equipment. Such organizations exist both in central Russia and in Siberia.

Garbage recycling is a complex process and the only right solution to maximize the potential of solid waste is burning with production of secondary energy and material resources. This direction can be a good strong business with minimal state support (at least at the "do not interfere" level). This can allow to dispose household waste and enterprise waste correctly and with maximum efficiency and profit.

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