Trial on Municipal Solid Waste
The final challenge that ESR
must face lies in the total elimination of landfill, and
this brings us back to a trial that was conducted in
Belgium in 1996 on 30,000 tons of MSW.
This waste contained
everything but food and garden waste, paper and cardboard.
The results of this trial were fairly amazing: the floats
of the 1.25 separator yielded an organic fraction of a
calorific content >12,000 BTU/lbs, while the recovery of
high-grade secondary aluminum was as high as 7.5%.
Source Separation of Food Waste
Therefore, if food waste is
kept source separate, a junk automobile and a trash bin
present themselves to the ESR dense medium separators in
roughly the same manner. If a complete set of ESR
separators can process the non-ferrous residue of as many
as 750 automobiles per hour, the same phenomenal tonnages
are easily accomplished with respect to MSW. A single set
of ESR separators could handle the entirety of the MSW
stream of any large US, Japanese or European city.
Once food waste is kept
source separate and recycled at its source, the remainder
of the garbage bin can pass through the ESR separation
process with the ease and efficiency of an automobile, a
television set or an outdated computer. Once food waste is
kept source separate and recycled at its source, it is easy
to imagine a world in which landfills are completely
eliminated.
Far Cheaper to Avoid Landfill Than to Create It
Minimal source separation,
together with dense medium separation, together with the
bioconversion of putrescent organic waste, together with
the thermal conversion of non-putrescent organic waste
(either cement kilns or gasifiers), allow us to recycle
virtually all of the waste normally destined for landfill.
Even the non-metallic inorganic material isolated by this
dense medium process can profitably serve as a low grade
aggregate.
When the infrastructure
needed to implement this strategy is well established, we
should not be surprised to discover that it is far cheaper,
even in the short term, to avoid landfill than to create
it. A landfill is undoubtedly one of the worst things we
can pass on to future generations. Surely this dangerous
and inherently evil activity has to stop.
The Future is Now
Most municipalities throughout the world acknowledge the importance of landfill elimination, but very few realize that all of the essential elements needed to make this happen are already in place. A future in which everything is recycled and landfill is eliminated does not lie 100, 50 or even 20 years down the road. The future is now. It has already arrived.
