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Waste processing needs a boost

The disposal of waste products from our modern society never seems to get much attention until some calamity occurs.

The disposal of waste products from our modern society never seems to get much attention until some calamity occurs. It's not much of concern in western Canada being existing methods and availability of disposal sites seems to satisfy the demands of the situation. It helps that we have a relatively small population occupying a massive land base. It's the classic ''out of sight-out of mind'' situation. Other countries don't enjoy that privilege and have had to devise unique ways to dispose of their waste products, but not always in an environmentally correct approach. In most underdeveloped and Third World countries, waste disposal is minimal or non-existent and filth seems to be everywhere.

In areas where disposal has become a problem in western developed countries, various technologies have been used to address the problem. But those technologies tend to be costly and governments seem to go to excruciating lengths to stick with the old school approach of burying and covering the waste product. One notes in eastern Canada and the USA, government agencies spend hundreds of millions trucking waste great distances rather than spend money on more localized disposal technology. This system has caused much aggravation in rural areas where colossal dump sites have been established to bury the millions of tons of garbage produced by citizens in big cities. Yet burning and bio-digesting technology exists that could readily deal with such disposal problems.

Your ever-inquisitive columnist has written out on this topic in the past and found that in Europe, industrial scale bio-digesters (also known as biogas plants) have been established to process a wide variety of livestock, vegetable, crop, food and other sewage and organic waste. The technology of these bio-digesters has become so advanced that even the leftover residue from the anaerobic digestion process can be reduced into mineral elements like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash. The final remnants are a fibrous dry material that can be used as a crop mulch in the horticulture industry. The biggest by-product of a biogas plants is a gas – methane which is used to generate electricity. From an environmental perspective this type of waste disposal process should be the ideal avenue to sustainable waste disposal. Yet, compared to Europe, North America is a laggard in establishing such industrial scale waste disposal systems. Germany in particular is a world leader in this technology and its widespread application.

The technology is not unknown in Canada, small-scale biogas plants are being increasingly built at commercial sized livestock operations to deal with large amounts of manure. Perhaps the most significant biogas operation is a commercial-sized plant located at Highland Feeders near Vegreville. It was built with support from government research grants and has now been made commercially available. But it's not of the industrial size required to process thousands of tons of waste on a daily basis. The problem with building such a plant is the multi-million dollar capital investment. The other problem is that with our present "out of sight-out of mind'' policy, building such a plant is just not sexy enough to change old school attitudes. Compare that to government support of wind farms, which seem to be the darling of governments and green lobby groups.

I would suggest that governments need to extend their support of green technology and renewables to the establishment of industrial sized bio-digesters. The same tax incentives need to be extended, along with electrical tariff advantages that are used to support windfarms. Perhaps garbage dump tipping fees need to be increased to help support the building of industrial plants. This is not a new approach, most city folks pay extra fees to have their recyclables collected and processed. Maybe they need to be charged to have their waste products recycled. The side benefit from biogas plants that windmills don't provide are the by-products that can be reused for food production.

An ideal location for such a large scale commercial plant could be near Lethbridge, which produces an abundance of waste from its diverse agricultural and food production base. One might even consider bringing liquid municipal waste by rail from Edmonton and Calgary to make the plant even more viable.

What's needed is some vision from governments at every level, but therein lies the problem. This type of waste disposal concept involves so many different departments and diverse vested interests that cooperation would require a monumental bureaucratic and political effort. It seems waste disposal would need to get the same halo of political correctness as windmills to get some real attention.