The Stinky Smell of Success

July 14, 2008

We've been talking about serious trash power for a long time so it's rather--well, refreshing isn't the right word--exciting to see it put into practice. This month the Macarthur Resource Recovery Park in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, began accepting its first batch of garbage from 300,000 people in the area. First the recyclables are sorted out and then billions of microbes (more bugs!) in giant tanks gobble up the refuse, producing methane for power. Unlike other setups that only snag 70 percent of the gas, this plant is expected to capture 100 percent of the methane emitted inside oxygen-free tanks.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the $49 million plant will stop 9,000 truckloads of trash from going into landfills annually. I had read that gasification plants have been built in Asia and Europe, but Macarthur Resource Recovery Park's operations manager Bruce Bailey told Fairfax Media that it's the first full-scale plant in the world using this technology. Meanwhile, plans for a similar waste-to-energy plant were recently approved in Ottawa, Canada. The PlascoEnergy Group's Canadian complex will be the first one in North America. They're getting warmer...

Photo: Macarthur Resource Recovery Park interior. Credit: WSN Environmental Solutions