The municipality in my city Linköping, Sweden has actually made a really impressive business model out of this. I pay them to pick up my garbage twice every month, and then I pay them to heat my house by burning that same garbage. And they have me put organic waste in special green bags that are separated from the other garbage using computer vision, making bio gas that I pay for to drive my car on.
In my home town of Trollhättan, the entire public transportation network was driven on biogas from the organic trash of the people. While sorting the garbage into organic/inorganic was a bit of a pain, the result was really impressive.
In theory all that's emitted is carbon dioxide and water after filter and wet-cleaning stages. I'm sure it's not perfect, though it's lightyears better than most comparables, especially considering the reduction in environmental impact from landfills .
It's also worth noting that since they primarily burn organic matter (plastics and metals get recycled in other ways), the CO2 that is released into the air is CO2 that was taken out of the air only a few years earlier. (Instead of, say, a few million years ago, as is the case with petroleum products)
No, this is not an example of a sunken costs fallacy. This is not "in for the penny, in for the pound" sort of logic.
Consider that the alternative is letting the organic waste rot, and in the process, release C02 and methane.
What they are doing here is removing CO2 temporarily from the atmosphere with solar power, then releasing the CO2 to produce heat which they then convert to electricity. It's solar power, they just use photosynthesis and the general population gets some use out of the middle step.
The reason this is not a good idea to do with CO2 that was taken out of the atmosphere millenia ago is that 1) we don't want that much CO2 back in the atmosphere, and 2) we don't want that much CO2 back in the atmosphere that fast. Doing it in the short term, unlike in the long term, is not creating "unplanned" conditions.
However, I am sure clever filtering could solve the problem.
(Credit where credit is due: A banned user posted a link to a UK guardian article about air pollution due to garbage incineration, giving me a good place to start my research.)
Dioxins are created by burning trash at low temperatures, e.g. in a personal burn barrel. At high temperatures dioxins are destroyed. Please don't scare the Swedes.
Wait, isn't it better to actually recycle this stuff, rather than just burn it? By burning it aren't we forever losing access to that physical matter by just turning it into heat radiation? What if we need it later?
EDIT: It sounds like the Swedes mainly burn the organic waste, and recycle what can be recycled. If that is the case, fair enough. Would have liked to see discussion about this in the article, seems fairly key.
However it's silly to say that we need to import trash. I've lived in cities like Helsingborg, Landskrona and Malmö, in several different apartments, and only ONCE have I had the facilities to dispose of organic waste separately.
So I think it's much better to do a national campaign and force landlords to implement organic waste disposal, hand out those brown paper bags some get from their landlord, before we decide to start importing trash.
The energy released is stored in the chemical bonds of the material being burned.
Matter is neither created nor destroyed in the process. Some of it "goes up in smoke", but we can use plants to capture those things back out of the air (either the green things or energy intensive industrial ones) .
Yeah, mainly correct but a small part of the matter is lost. That part which escapes from the system into space as IR radiation is practically speaking ever beyond our grasp. Its the Law of Conservation of matter/energy.
Human energy utilization is a fraction of a fraction of the solar energy that moves in and out of the earth system. Heat lost from burning is not something worth worrying about right now.
