Needed: A case for waste
The Sacramento Bee reports that the city may kill plans to build a next generation waste to energy plant that uses a technology called plasma arc gasification. City council is citing uncertainties around the developer’s opaque financials and the unknown environmental impact of the plant as the reasons why they are hesitant to greenlight a project that will put renewable electricity on the grid while preventing most if not all of the city’s trash from being driven to a dump in Reno.
OK, I get the part about the developer’s financials – but the environmental impact? You’d think there probably isn’t a high environmental bar to get over when the status quo is driving diesel trucks 280 miles roundtrip to throw trash into a hole. But Sacramento’s hesitation actually reveals a pretty good point about this technology: we really have very little idea what will happen if we built one of these plants to utility scale. It’s time for someone to make a sound case for the gasification of solid waste.
