Turning trash into power: North America’s first gasification facility to come to Ottawa

Even the friendliest of the eco-friendly produce waste — as progressive as we might be, at the end of the day we still end up with a handful of un-compostable, un-recyclable waste. What is an environmental activist to do? Turn that waste into power.

The City of Ottawa, Ontario recently approved the building of a waste-to-energy facility that will convert 400 metric tons of waste into 21 megawatts of net electricity. This will be North America’s first such facility, and it is expected to power up to 19,000 homes. Now that’s a good use for trash.

Although this will be North America’s first such plant, encouraging examples of similar facilities can be found in Europe and in Asia. Meanwhile this month our friends down under — Australia that is — at the Macarthur Resource Recovery Park began accepting its first batch of garbage from 300,000 people. So how does it work? First all recyclable items are sorted out and then the trash is thrown into giant tanks where billions of microbes work to turn the waste into methane used for power.

Maybe producing trash isn’t so bad after all… as long as you live next to one of the processing facilities that is.

[Via Huffington Post Green]

[Photo D'Arcy Norman, flickr]