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incinerator

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why don't we see more trash incinerators around?

Reply with a bit more reason why this thread you just started shouldn't be incinerated in a reasonable time frame or the match will be lit.......
 
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im just wondering since garbage--->heat--->energy==$$$$$

seems like we should have more around
 
I burn all of my combustible trash in my custom built incinerator boiler. Plus anything else that can be burned as well.

Tires, old cloths, wood, plastics, furniture, used oils, and basically anything else that can be chopped down to under 18 inches square and less than 48 inches long.
I estimated my trash and used oils to have a usable heat value equivalent to at least $400 worth of fuel every year. :)

If I remember correctly my present avatar picture is my boiler working its way through a load with a car tire, some plastic computer or TV monitor bodies, some rail road tie or bridge planing pieces, and a few other things. :D
 
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now that is super black! isnt there a law about that?

and this is a broiler system?

it doesn't produce electricity then?
 
Its a multi fuel boiler for heating my house and where I live we don't have much care or concerns about what smokes and how much. :)

Its a regular occurrence around here to burn off fields, old tree rows, abandoned houses and buildings plus whatever may be in them, resulting in black smoke clouds that can easily be seen from tens of miles away. Around here my occasional little black puffs don't even raise and eyebrow with the neighbors. :D

Its quite common around here to get rid of old houses and buildings, even in town, by contacting the local fire and rescue departments and donating them to be used in their training exercise programs. Basically the fire and rescue crews will come and use whatever you have for destructive rescue practice and training exercises and then burn the place down for you when they are done! :D

You have to clean up the ash's and mess afterward though. ;)
 
doggy on any large scale the main problems is air emissions and what's done with the leftover waste, especially from tires or plastics and what not the ash leftover is legally considered hazardous waste.

Mind you TCM I'm sure saves a bit of money, he's venting tons of concentrated nasty compounds into the air from the smoke and ground water wherever the ash gets dumped. All the burning does is concentrate the nasties. Landfills aren't ideal but they release back into the environement at a much slower rate over time. Even if the burning continues the best way to dispose of the ash would be to mix it with concrete to immobilize it and dump it somewhere where natural erosion will have trouble breaking it down.

Actually TCM I'm a little disappointed in seeing your post. PCB components monitor bodies etc..? The volatiles you're putting out are horrendously bad to anything anywhere they land, the cancer rate downwind of you is probably twice the normal rate. Even if there's no one downwind of you, this stuff hits the ground and goes into the ground water with the next rain. Everyone seems to think it's no big woop, but the problem is that so many people think it's no big woop that it is a big woop =)

Personally I see no problem with burning things like paper/wood basically any natural fiberous material. But tires and plastics?! Nooooo way. The best way to deal with them as waste is to chop them up in a grinder and use them as aggregate for something. The legality of burning stuff like this varies from state to state.
 
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Most of what I burn is actually done with a clean burning method. The picture was just from one day where I was over fed it while doing a peak burn calibration test and the air was dead calm so the smoke just hung there. It looked too interesting to pass it up for a photo! :D

My boiler is digitally controlled and can usually give me a clean low smoke burn of most anything if mixed with the right volumes of dry wood. Most days I can burn a tire a day and not even smell it in my own yard. The heavy plastics and other stuff do need to be thinned out more to burn clean though. ;)

Still where I come from very little gets regulated regarding pollution. Big industry and power plants are about it. There are just far too many people who know what comes from where and realize it is a waste of time and money try to enforce nit picking what the general population does.

To be honest where I live the general consensus was/is that given the supposed regional effects we where seeing from global warming we where gaining far more than loosing. If anything the general opinion now is that too bad it turned out to be a scam but we did have our doubts long before that anyway. :(
 
In the air or in the ash, it's still there. You can't burn off heavy metals, at least I hope not otherwise you're more than just a little bit ahead of the game =) You can only reconfigure them in different end substances, the pollutant is still there, if your furnace is running properly you can take care of the bulk majority of volatiles, but the black smoke in your Avatar and the fact that you've said "can usually" "most days" lends me to believe that the stuff you're burning would be much better off left to commercial incinerators.

To be honest where I live the general consensus was/is that given the supposed regional effects we where seeing from global warming we where gaining far more than loosing. If anything the general opinion now is that too bad it turned out to be a scam but we did have our doubts long before that anyway.

Give it a few hundred years. We're gaining short term energy benefits, the pollutants will be here FOREVER., and they collect over time. Many commercial incinerators could still use your ash and spent exhaust gasses as fuel, so don't for even a micro second thing you're burning clean if you can't see smoke.

If you told me you're dumping your ash in a geographical region that will prevent the soluble elements from entering the water tables for the next thousand years I might feel better. Ash aside, 'clear burning' is not clean burning.
 
what kind of nasties are we talking(base compounds pls!), I always thought that tires and plastic are polys (hydrocarbons) and if thats the case shouldn't they all combust to CO2 with enough O2?

also I wonder why arn't dumps doing this for energy, or if there is anyone on a larger scale

another thing I wonder about is if there is a system to "bottle" the CO2 coming out of there, maybe compress it to dry ice?
and is there a way to filter CO2 from atmosphere>?

ultimately what I picture is a device that would extract the CO2 exclusively and reuse the exhaust air as fuel(since its full of incomplete reactions)?

or maybe im just dreaming?
 
another thing I wonder about is if there is a system to "bottle" the CO2 coming out of there, maybe compress it to dry ice?
and is there a way to filter CO2 from atmosphere>?

ultimately what I picture is a device that would extract the CO2 exclusively and reuse the exhaust air as fuel(since its full of incomplete reactions)?

or maybe im just dreaming?


No there are countless numbers of things that do it already. They belong to to the plant kingdom! Plants breath CO2 and return it as oxygen while keeping the carbon for themselves. :)

Give it a few hundred years. We're gaining short term energy benefits, the pollutants will be here FOREVER., and they collect over time. Many commercial incinerators could still use your ash and spent exhaust gasses as fuel, so don't for even a micro second thing you're burning clean if you can't see smoke.

If you told me you're dumping your ash in a geographical region that will prevent the soluble elements from entering the water tables for the next thousand years I might feel better. Ash aside, 'clear burning' is not clean burning.


I wont be here in a few hundred years. I will be surprised if I get another 4 decades. As far as I am concerned I get free heat and the cleanliness is relative to what perspective you see it from. I consider it to be dirtier that pure oxygen but far cleaner than an active volcano. The part where I am at in between the two is just semantics. ;)
 
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furshure, im not judging, my dad does similar with woodstove's & fans.

I'v just been thinking lately about it and a process called the "GEET fuel system" (if it actually works)

Also there is technology(secret) i know that can step up the efficiency 10X, I am also thinking that if we can capture and compress the excess CO2, we may be able to do something lucrative with it.

I guess I'm just wondering who the "FAT CATS" are in this industry, maybe i could hit one up to buy my designs!?!
 
CO2 can be separated from air by compressing to high pressures, and draining off the various liquid components as they liquefy, that's how oxygen and nitrogen are generally obtained. CO2 is a very small percentage of air and so not economically obtainable in this fashion.

Gaseous CO2 is a by-product in some large volume chemical processes, and so has low value. Near where I live there is a big anhydrous ammonia (fertilizer) plant that produces huge quantities of CO2 as a by-product. They have a pipeline running directly to another company that produces dry ice and liquid CO2. I suspect the largest cost by far of dry ice is in the energy to compress and cool it.

Burning garbage can be done, but only at substantial cost to clean up the exhaust / ash. In my area, I can't legally burn my own trash. I own a business that generates substantial amounts of clean dry sawdust, and can't even justify setting up to burn it to heat my plant due to permits and regulations, not to mention insurance costs. It would be more economical in areas when waste disposal costs are higher.

If you want to burn something and get value from the waste, I think it would be better to starve the process for oxygen and produce carbon monoxide (CO). CO can be combined with oxygen to produce methanol via the fischer-tropsh process, but is only economical on a large scale, since it is a high pressure process. I have looked into doing this on a smaller scale, but have not been able to find a source for small quantities of the catalyst required.

I believe stochiometric combustion is already a highly efficient process, I would guess in the high 90's. I don't believe it is mathematically possible to increase the efficiency to 990+ % :). Maybe you expect to reduce the inefficiency by a factor of 10?
 
Why would you want to extract CO2 from the atmosphere? CO2 is what keeps plants happy, which they turn into food for us, and other animals. Man-made CO2 is also the only thing keeping this planet warm, and obviously there is a slight deficit this year, but not quite as bad as last winter.
 
isnt CO2 what causes smog in cities? obviously the plants arn't keeping up.... actually I am just thinking that CO2 is a commodity.... if i had an incinerator that had no emissions wouldn't it be more popular?

I mean maybe im just looking to deep....but waste to energy.... thats almost free energy, epically considering most 1st world countries generate tons of land fill trash each year...

In my plan though the CO2 needs to be extracted as waste so that the fuel/combustion cycle stays combustible,
 
Smog is a mixture of smoke and fog. Or more specifically microscopic dust and combustion particulates mixed with water vapor.
 
Why would you want to extract CO2 from the atmosphere? CO2 is what keeps plants happy

You wouldn't want to extract CO2 from the atmosphere to obtain CO2, that was my point. As a matter of fact, lots of research money is being spent worldwide to learn how to economically remove it from the atmosphere and sequester it permanently. CO2 is a major contributor to the greenhouse effect, therefore global warming.

I disagree that man-made CO2 is the only thing keeping the planet warm, since it was warm long before man started contributing. The problem is when we remove hydrocarbons from the earth and combust them for energy, we are dumping carbon in the form of CO2 into the air that has been buried for many millions of years, and hence are effecting the climate.

I'm not sure we are responsible for the current warming trend, but we are definitely dumping billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
 
Doggy,

If you had an incinerator that converted garbage to energy for almost free with no emissions, that would indeed be popular, to say the least.

The only way I can believe no emissions is via e=mc squared. Basically, you convert 1/2 the mass to antimatter and let it combine with the rest. Otherwise, whatever you put in has to come out, some of it in a lower energy form such as CO or CO2, or heat would not be produced.
 
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