Recycle! Positive Comments Welcome

[Wheelsup]

Only high value waste e.g. metals can be recycled economically in a small place like Shetland. Even that will involve sending by ship to Scotland, which is probably not realistically doing much for our carbon footprint. General rubbish recycling will probably never be viable and there incinerating it and making use of the heat produced is probably the least damaging. 

Reducing waste has to be the better solution,e.g. reducing packaging and plastics, and eating mainly locally produced products

[Suffererof1crankymofo]

@ Space - Well George seems to understand it perfectly!

[Space]

^ Can you not speak for yourself? George can explain what he thinks if he wants to.

Ok, Recycling = Incineration, fundamentally wrong, but if that's what you think...

Simple concept and definitions, all over the internet, loads of articles and you argue that apples are oranges.

 

Wheelsup - agreed.

Edited March 6, 2018 by Space

[mogling]

Was it not on the radio a while back that our council doesn't really have any choice -

the scottish government's targets for recycling must now be complied with.

 

Monday, 21 August 2017

http://www.shetnews.co.uk/news/15067-sic-plan-for-isles-wide-recycling-collections

 

...An existing derogation allowing Shetland’s household waste to be incinerated at the Greenhead-based energy recovery plant will not be extended, while the government is targeting a recycling rate of 70 per cent by the middle of the next decade...

 

 

Monday, 06 October 2014

http://www.shetnews.co.uk/news/9446-sic-opts-for-new-mix-of-burning-and-recycling

 

...Infrastructure director Maggie Sandison said changes in legislation left the SIC with no option but to change tack. The situation remains in flux, with further legislative changes expected, and she suspects that in the long term the council will be “recycling more and incinerating less”....

 

 

They're looking to import more refuse to burn to run the SHEAP 

or it'll probably have to use diesel, very green. Will district heating prices

rise more then?

 

Someone asked a long time ago, could they not make use of the hot water

produced by the power station instead of them just pumping it into the sea-

did that ever happen?

[George.]

Was it not on the radio a while back that our council doesn't really have any choice - the scottish government's targets for recycling must now be complied with.

 

IMHO, it doesn't matter whether it's the S. I. C, the Scottish government, Westminster or anybody else. Recycling has to be carried out as much as possible to stop us destroying the world at an amazing rate - as we happily kill mankind with the pollution that we inflict upon ourselves. If we effectively recycled as much as possible, all the relative problems caused would rapidly be minimised.

Edited March 6, 2018 by George.

[Suffererof1crankymofo]

@ mogling - it's EU legislation, yanno, that organisation we're leaving, plus some of the legislation we're exempt from; plus there's loads of new incinerators being built elsewhere in the UK so there is no guarantee that we'll get the waste they are expecting for Shetland to process in order for their figures to add up.

[Suffererof1crankymofo]

^ Can you not speak for yourself? George can explain what he thinks if he wants to.

Ok, Recycling = Incineration, fundamentally wrong, but if that's what you think...

Simple concept and definitions, all over the internet, loads of articles and you argue that apples are oranges.

 

Wheelsup - agreed.

Jeez wept, of course I can blooming well speak for myself!  I wasn't asking George to speak for me.

 

Here's a novel idea:  STOP twisting what I'm saying.  Recycling does not equal incineration.  You are (purposely) leaving out the district heating scheme despite, no doubt, knowing that elsewhere in the UK, an incinerator would be just that, an incinerator without the heat energy product.

[MuckleJoannie]

 

Someone asked a long time ago, could they not make use of the hot water

produced by the power station instead of them just pumping it into the sea-

did that ever happen?

That is why the SHEAP building is next the power station. Unfortunately SSE changed their mind.

[Ghostrider]

^ Furnace ash and flue gas is not recyclable. The heat produced is not recyclable/ renewable, unless you are using something like a wind turbine to produce it. Waste used as a fuel in a furnace to produce heat is single use... burn it and you then have to go and find more waste to burn. So wrong, incineration is not recycling. It doesn't even fit the definition you quoted.

 

So the fact that by burning the waste and producing useable and used heat, you DO NOT have to burn a non-renewable resource of the same calorific value counts for nothing then?

 

Lets not forget one of the basic tenets of sceince here, that you cannot create something from nothing on this planet, all you can do is alter the state of whats already here in to a different state. A certain percentage of each tonne of crude oil recovered creates plastics, another portion creates diesel, does it really matter whether you burn the plastic portion of the tonne to heat x numbers of homes, after its been used to transport your milk, bleach or whatever to you, or burn the doesel portion thats served no other purpose than do it. You've still lost a portion of your tonne of crude to the atmosphere either way.

 

Incineration, in and off itself, where the heat it produces is simply vented off to the environment or atmosphere is very wasteful, and certainly not 'recycling' in any sense, of that much we can agree. However, what you're failing to acknowledge is incineration, where the heat is captured, and re-used, re-purposed, re-cycled, call it whatever you will, for a purpose that would otherwise consume additional non-renewable resources, is a whole other ball game which requires its 'recycling' definition and credentials to be revisited.

 

Not all incineration is the same, by a very long shot.

 

The old incinera\tor at Rova Head was an 'ecological disater' as it vented heat and gasses in to the atmosphere and required regular infusions of coal to keep it going, so they built an 'environmentallly friendly' one where the gasses were filtered to only allow 'safe' ones to be emitted, and the heat produced to be put to good use, or that what they told us. Yet now it too has become an ecological pariah, or so they're telling us now.

 

Somewhere among those things they've told us there has to be at least one lie, as they're contradictory. Which is the lie, I'll leave folk to figure out for themselves.

[Space]

^ You are incinerating waste and capturing heat for use in district heating. It is not recycling, repurposing, reuse. It's a single use one way street. Waste fuels the process. Other types of fuel could also be used. Once spent, you have to find more fuel. To suggest that we already recycle by use of the incinerator is plain wrong.

Incineration is simply waste disposal that is a bit more preferable to land fill, higher on the heirarchy.

Yes, the heat it produces is beneficial, particularly when we consider geography. But it is not recycling. It burns stuff that could otherwise be recycled.

The argument about recycling in Shetland and transporting waste and whether it is worth it/ recycling v incineration etc is a valid.

Edited March 7, 2018 by Space

[George.]

A certain percentage of each tonne of crude oil recovered creates plastics, another portion creates diesel, does it really matter whether you burn the plastic portion of the tonne to heat x numbers of homes, after its been used to transport your milk, bleach or whatever to you, or burn the doesel portion thats served no other purpose than do it. 

 

Yes, it matters if you burn the plastic portion. To burn plastic creates pollution, huge amounts of poisonous pollution in the fresh air. Plastic is a disaster. Hopefully you don't burn it and poison the world, you're better off burying it instead. Unfortunately, then it takes about hundreds, thousands of years to break down.

 

Plastic is a pollutant. A very destructive one which every single person on planet Earth should know about, whether they use it or not.

Edited March 7, 2018 by George.

[Space]

Jeez wept, of course I can blooming well speak for myself! I wasn't asking George to speak for me.

 

Here's a novel idea: STOP twisting what I'm saying. Recycling does not equal incineration. You are (purposely) leaving out the district heating scheme despite, no doubt, knowing that elsewhere in the UK, an incinerator would be just that, an incinerator without the heat energy product.

I am not twisting anything. You said "using the incinerator and powering the district heating system IS recycling" and words to the effect several times, with upper case IS. Sorry, you don't explain yourself well at all.

The impression I get is that the use/ definition of the word recycling is being twisted in this topic.

Edited March 7, 2018 by Space

[Space]

Incineration, in and off itself, where the heat it produces is simply vented off to the environment or atmosphere is very wasteful, and certainly not 'recycling' in any sense, of that much we can agree. However, what you're failing to acknowledge is incineration, where the heat is captured, and re-used, re-purposed, re-cycled, call it whatever you will, for a purpose that would otherwise consume additional non-renewable resources, is a whole other ball game which requires its 'recycling' definition and credentials to be revisited.

 

In my opinion I would have said its waste disposal credentials (as opposed to  its 'recycling' definition and credentials).

 

... so they built an 'environmentallly friendly' one where the gasses were filtered to only allow 'safe' ones to be emitted, and the heat produced to be put to good use, or that what they told us. Yet now it too has become an ecological pariah, or so they're telling us now.

 

Does anyone know what flue gas systems are in use at the plant? or is it just a matter of sorting and selecting what stuff is burned to minimise harmful emissions?

Pariah, or has it just become ecologically/ politically less preferable than alternatives?

Edited March 7, 2018 by Space

[engineer21]

They much have a scrubber, i cant see how it would have got past planning / environment before, new laws on air emission are quite strict.

 

of course if you go down the air pollution route....what's worse...one commercial incinerator for 6000 homes or 6000 open-fires / oil fired boilers or electric heaters all taking power from a diesel engine?

 

fact is anything other than the SHEAP is a step backwards......i can understand us now not being able to build a system which uses waste to heat homes....

but we have it now it exists so surely the govt should have been lobbied to keep the status quo on such a unique set of circumstances

 

do any other island groups exist with a District heating schemes? 

 

i know only of housing schemes which have been built with them mainly in england (there was a documentary on them)

[George.]

do any other island groups exist with a District heating schemes? 

 

What group of islands can you think of that exists with a district heating system?