O sweet spontaneous earth
how often
have the doting fingers of purient philosophers pinched and poked thee,
has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty
Last night I learned more about how waste becomes a valuable resource, from Enval, Bio Group and Green PB. The problem these companies are tackling is how to process things that break down very slowly or which produce bad effects in landfill, and recover the valuable components which cost so much energy to produce in each one.
There was a lively debate in the Cleantech Special Interest Group. The companies are at very different stages of technology maturity and the degree to which the supply chain already separates their inputs or values their outputs also differs. For example, for Enval and Green PB, producing aluminium and lead respectively, there are well established world markets and high prices for the outputs. By contrast, Bio Group gas outputs will have to be collected into a National Grid if they are not to simply be burned to produce electricity and release the carbon anyway, so their anaerobic plants initially rely on high gate prices as the UK complies with legislation to keep organic matter out of landfill. The way the companies formed was also quite different. Enval and Green PB came out of University of Cambridge labs, helped by Cambridge University Entrepreneurs and I-teams respectively, while Bio Group is based on industry expertise.
What they all have in common is novel processes, low energy and low carbon, to transform these byproducts of the way we live and keep them out of the ground. Laminated plastic and aluminium, organic waste and lead car batteries are going to produced in our society and we will have to dispose of them. Its great to see companies setting out ways that Cambridge ideas can change not only the world, but the earth we live on.
Hi Matt,
I saw your blog entry from the waste event - sounds like it was very interesting.
A pernickity point of accuracy: burning landfill gas to produce electricity is still good for the environment, even though CO2 is released. This is because the landfill gas is methane, which is roughly 25 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. In fact, just burning the landfill methane is good, even if you don't recover any energy from it (this is called flaring). Recovering energy is even better though, because it displaces fossil fuel use elsewhere, and that's why injection into the gas grid would be the best use of landfill gas, because it is the more efficient energy conversion. So burning for heat is better than burning for electricity is better than just flaring, but they're all better than letting the methane escape.
Rant over!