A Town Hall meeting will be held in the morning of the Elmvale Foundation’s World Water Day celebration March 28 to discuss/disseminate information related to how the County initiatives related to future “waste”stream management might impact on water source protection.
Simcoe County residents and people with expertise in the area are welcome to attend and contribute. Dr. William Shotyk, a founder of the Elmvale Foundation, will present a summary from Denmark, prepared by Dr. Mike Goodsite, professor of environmental chemisty at the DMU (National Environmental Research Institute, Aarhus University.
According to a recent survey by the BBC, Denmark leads the European Union in waste diversion, at 94 per cent. The attached 2009 EU report, Diverting waste from landfill – Effectiveness of waste‑management policies in the European Union, provides an analysis of policy measures in six countries or regions, including Denmark.
Diverting waste from landfill
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I looked into ‘the attached 2009 EU report’. According to this they are using incineration as the most effective way of diverting waste from landfill. You will find a small section of this report describes incineration. Germany is about 33% incineration — I believe that Sweden is well over 50% incineration. There are very high on this.
But nobody seems to be concerned about the 20% bottom ash left after the incineration process which goes into landfill. To say nothing of the fly ash which is toxic waste and may or may not be going to landfill. If Denmark diverts 94% that means 6% goes into landfill. Somehow this 6% must be a magical number since it includes at least 15% bottom ash and maybe 5% fly ash. Somehow someone made a mistake somewhere or did they make it up? Incineration actually turns garbage into toxic gas and heavy metals. If the smoke from the process is properly cleaned a lot of it will not get into the air. We hope. But why create such a risk?
What sickens me is that there is an excellent way of getting energy from processing waste which only leaves 2% of inert material. This system the Elementa system actually gets three times more green energy from waste than incineration. It is non-toxic and works by a chemical process called steam Reformation.
It is urgent that those of us who care about our own health and that of our families and friends and neighbors work together to try and stop this sort of assault on our quality of life. It does not take European air long to get to Canada.
Nicholas Rowe
Nickolas, I just went to the Elementa website & I am really impressed! You seem to know something about this. Would it be possible for you to attend the meeting in Elmvale on World Water Day & ask some questions regarding this type of waste management? Surely everyone should be made aware of this as an alternative to landfill, incineration etc.
You can always tell when a bubble is about to burst. It happens just after the politicians have almost run out of ways to waste money. They reach the stage of committing hundreds of thousands of uncollected revenues to open air sculpture in the middle of the wilderness. They increase the size of their offices to free up air for more bureaucrats to breathe. They commit millions to court cases they have no interest in winning. In which, in fact, the public interest would be served best if the cases were lost. And they pay their civil servants as if they were entrepreneurs with hot new patents in their back pockets, being head hunted by multinationals.
Let us wake up: the Council we elect in November is already in deep financial trouble. The likelihood is that revenues are going to go down. Most of the new developments planned are not going to get built, not for a while. And there is going to be a lot of unemployment. Higher levels of government are not going to have money to spare and we are going to have to spend money wisely, concentrate on helping our own people and let the contractors, consultants and PR firms from Montreal, St Louis and Toronto find work on their own.
That means that recycling and zero waste are the only sensible solutions, economically as well as ecologically. They are low tech, involve no big capital expenditure, they create lots of jobs for workers, rather than consulting engineers, architects and bureaucrats, and they can be dispersed around the county, thereby cutting down on transport costs. They also offer us a real choice between pitching in to make re-cycling work or committing money, that we still haven’t earned, to pay higher taxes or sacrifice vital local services.
Economically we have just had a very prosperous period, largely fuelled by a debt bubble that has been deflating for two years and still has a long way to go. Unfortunately our council(s) have not noticed what has been going on in the world. They have been going wild with the Credit Card and we are going to have lots of bills to pay just when we can’t afford them. And lots of new office space just when storefronts everywhere are closing up.
The last thing we need is to splurge on a high tech solution to a very simple problem: household waste. And it is simple: all that is needed to reduce the stream of garbage to a few items is a commitment to re-cycle plastic, textiles and other materials aklready being recycled succesfully, elsewhere. And, incredibly, the only reason that this is not done is that the county cannot, it says, find a stable market for it. Which is to say that, because we can’t get a decent price for our plastic waste we are going to bury it, at enormous cost, in landfills from which leachates will slowly poison our ground water. Or burn it, at even greater expense, so that it pollutes our air and leaches into our water. Zero Waste = Zero Problem.