If all Europeans bicycled as much as the people of Denmark, the European Union could achieve up to one-quarter of its target for carbon emissions reductions in the transportation sector by 2050, a new report says.

According to the European Cyclists’ Federation, the average Dane cycles about 2.6 kilometers a day. If that rate were achieved across the EU, it would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 55 million to 120 million tons annually, or 5 to 11 percent of the EU’s overall emissions target, by 2020. (By 2020, the EU has vowed to reduce emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels).

By 2050, a large-scale shift to cycling would represent a cut in C02 emissions of 63 million to 142 million tons, or 12 to 26 percent of the target reduction for the transportation sector.

Since the EU is unlikely to meet its targets with more efficient technology alone, the report says a shift away from cars is critical. Meanwhile, New York City transportation officials say the number of people bicycling in Manhattan this year is double the ridership in 2007, largely as a result of increased bike lanes across the city.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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Two weeks ago, the citizens of Denmark elected Helle Thorning-Schmidt as the country’s first female prime minister. And in the period since, negotiators from the three parties working to form a new coalition government have hinted at the kinds of policy decisions the left-center coalition will be making to set it apart from the outgoing right-leaning government. One such policy change could strip funding from an institute headed by Bjorn Lomborg, the so-called “skeptical environmentalist” and  a controversial figure in climate politics. The Danish political scientist, who has denied that he is a climate change skeptic, per se, has raised the hackles of climate activists for his downplaying of the seriousness of climate change.

“We’re negotiating the government, which includes the budget,” said Social Democrat environmental spokesperson Mette Gjerskov, according to state broadcaster DRA and the Copenhagen Post. “Our starting point is that money which is given to people who do not agree that there are climate change problems should be chucked out.”

Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Center receives 1.6 million dollars annually from the Danish government in a deal worked out by the outgoing conservative government. The government funding has long drawn criticism from Danish climate activists.

“Researchers should get their money through the systems that we already have in place. It’s been very strange that particular researchers have received special treatment due to ideology. We’re going to run fiscal policy differently,” Ida Auken from the Socialist People’s Party said,  “We’re not persecuting anyone. We just want to use the money differently.”

Representatives of the incoming coalition government would not comment on the future of the Copenhagen Consensus Center specifically, because it was a budgetary matter still being hammered out by the negotiators.

Article appearing courtesy Ecopolitology.

photo: Tim Hurst/Ecopolitology

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For the past 40 years, Denmark has been synonymous with world-class green high-tech solutions. It began with wind technology as a solution to the 1970s oil crisis, but since then the Danish cleantech sector has evolved and now offers technologies within all types of sustainable energy, climate-friendly solutions and energy saving products to individuals as well as to businesses. And it is a first-mover market for many cleantech sectors for foreign companies. Many countries have devised strategies for future clean energy and green economy glory but few have created as concrete and tangible plans as Denmark.

1) Denmark’s goal of becoming fossil-free country in 2050. Since 1980 Denmark has increased its GDP by 80% while keeping its gross energy consumption stable and reducing carbon emissions. But now Denmark is ready to jump to the next generation of clean energy economy. Thus the government of Denmark has unveiled its ‘Energy Strategy 2050’, which calls for the country to be completely independent from fossil fuels by 2050. According to a government release, Denmark is aiming to reduce its use of fossil fuels in the energy sector by 33% by 2020 compared to 2009. The strategy calls for a significant increase in renewable energy obtained from wind, biomass and biogas which over the next decade will increase the share of renewables to 33 percent of energy consumption. The initiative also calls for the wind power production capacity to double to 42% by 2020 where around 62% of electricity generation will come from renewable energy sources.

2) World leading exporter of energy technology. Danish exports of energy technology and equipment have more than tripled since 1989. This is due not least to early demand and ef¬forts within research, development and test¬ing of new energy technologies. Green energy technologies today hold a prominent position in total Danish exports of goods and two-thirds of green energy technologies come from the wind turbine sector. For more than a decade Denmark has topped the EU list of exporters of energy technologies and equipment.

3) First-mover market for EVs. Denmark’s pursuit and investments into EVs and the needed infrastructure will lead to one of the first-mover markets in the world. This is due to the unique situation of having a well-developed grid infrastructure, a very high share of wind power into the grid and the largest market for electrical energy in the world. Denmark aims to be the global leader in developing a national electric vehicle charging network that uses the cars’ batteries as a storage reservoir to balance the intermittency of wind. For example, Renault, Citrôen, Nissan, Peugeot, Mitsubishi, Volvo and Daimler have all announced imports of EVs to Denmark. Together with its partner Renault, Better Place have just opened Europe’s first Better Place center in Copenhagen.

4) A prototype for European Smart Grids. While many other countries are talking about smart grids as a future focus area, Denmark has for the last 20 years had to cope with handling a large share of renewable energy input to the energy system. Denmark is now on the forefront of having a state-of-the-art electrical grid system that is a) connected to the surrounding countries, b) in the global top 2 regarding highest security of supply, and c) the world’s highest percentage of renewable input to the electrical grid from distributed generation. Having the upstream electrical grid up-to-date enables project initiatives around downstream smart grid solutions to have much more concrete value in a Danish context. For foreign smart grid companies Denmark is a playground for R&D and test- and development before the larger markets are ready in the future. (see world’s largest intelligent grid tested in Denmark).

5) Large Cleantech Cluster. Denmark is home to the Copenhagen Cleantech Cluster, one of the largest cleantech clusters around the globe. Today, CCC counts more than 200 members, all engaged in a wide range of cleantech related activities ranging from Smart Grids, recycling of waste to sustainable urban development. CCC serves as the unifying umbrella for all the members and provides them with services within networks, events, knowledge-sharing activities among many other activities. CCC works to create increased growth in the Danish cleantech industry, attract and assist more foreign companies and talent and improve the business conditions of cleantech companies.

6) Large Number of Cleantech Businesses. There are a large number of cleantech businesses that reside in this country – from the largest global players to small startups with global reach. You can find large industrial conglomerates Siemens and IBM, smart grid companies Powersense, Green Wave Reality and Gridmanager, global water group DHI Group, biofuel companies Inbicon and Biogasol, and recent Cleantech Open category winner Abeo. An increasing number of foreign cleantech companies choose to establish a business entity or form partnerships in Denmark. Recently, the US-based EV manufacturer Tesla and smart grid company Spirae Inc. Established their presence in Denmark.

7) From pioneers in wind energy to a global hub for cleantech. Anyone who visits Denmark cannot miss the numerous windmills speckled throughout the country, providing electricity needs to numerous communities and farmers. For many, windmills have become the unofficial national symbol. Denmark uses wind energy to provide a majority of renewable energy. Currently, wind provides 20 percent of electricity needs in Denmark – the highest worldwide. By the end of 2009, the 5,000 windmills provided adequate electricity needs for more than one million households and the goal is to reach 50% wind power of the total electricity production in 2025. Denmark is home to many of the global premier wind power companies. Vestas, Siemens Wind Power, Gamesa, Suzlon, and many other wind turbine manufacturers have R&D offices. An interesting fact is that Danish companies account for 90% of the European market for offshore wind – a market projected to amount to DKK 75 billion per year until 2020 (source The Danish Wind Industry Association). In April 2012 the EWEA conference will be held in Copenhagen.

8 ) Access to Funding for Renewable Energy Research, Development and Commercialization. Denmark provides a number of opportunities to assist businesses in getting the necessary funding for research and development projects. Energinet.dk offers funding for energy research and development projects that assist in developing renewable power production. The Danish Energy Agency offers the EUDP program, which provides funding for the development and demonstration of new innovative energy technology. The Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation offers private companies and universities with the funds to develop and commercialize new technology.

9) Biomass and biofuels. In Denmark, biomass currently accounts for approximately 70% of renewable-energy consumption, mostly in the form of straw, wood and renewable wastes, while biogas accounts for less. Consumption of biomass for energy production more than quadrupled between 1980 and 2005 and further increases are expected in future – primarily for heat supply at district heating plants and in small-scale installations in households, at enterprises and institutions as well as large-scale power plants. Danish companies have developed efficient methods of combustion, gasification, and liquefaction of biomass for biofuels and biogas and have pioneered enzyme technology and other ways to maximize the efficiency of biofuels. Two of the world’s leading manufacturers of enzymes, Novozymes and Danisco Genencor, are located in Copenhagen and are important industry players.

10) Denmark’s 100% Renewable Energy Island. Off the coast of Denmark’s mainland rests the island of Samso, an island that is completely run by renewable sources of energy. These 112 square kilometers of land is just east of the Jutland peninsula and is home to a bit more than 4,000 residents. It is the first island in history to supply 100 percent of all electricity needs from renewable sources of energy, chiefly, the Samso offshore wind plant. Aside from the turbines, the 22 villages on the island are heated using wood chip and straw-run power plants and large solar panels.

Article by Shawn Lesser, Co-founder & Managing Partner of Atlanta-based Watershed Capital Group – an investment bank assisting sustainable fund and companies raise capital, perform acquisitions, and in other strategic financial decisions. He is also a Co-founder of the GCCA Global Cleantech Cluster Association ”The Global Voice of Cleantech”. He writes for various cleantech publications and is known as the David Letterman of Cleantech for his “Top 10″ series. He can be reached at shawn@watershedcapital.com

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Biofuels have been dismissed by environmentalists as an unsustainable alternative to fossil fuels. But some hope that second-generation biofuels could offer a better solution to the dirty oil crisis.

Second generation biofuel, or cellulosic biofuel, is made of non-food feedstocks such as straw and sugarcane bagasse. The technology is difficult and producing it on large scale is not easy, although Denmark has been spearheading second-generation biofuel application by offering it at Danish gas pumps. Elsewhere, researchers are busy at work developing enzymes that can break down the cellulose that envelopes biomass that can be used for this type of fuel.

Denmark has become a second generation biofuel hub, according to an in-depth report recently broadcast on Public Radio International. The article focused on the efforts by Inbicon, a spin-off of the country’s national energy company DONG energy near the capital city of Copenhagen.

The idea to produce second generation biofuel goes back to the mid-1990s when Denmark told its coal-fired power plants that they should burn straw as well, an initiative designed to make use of farm waste and reduce demand for fossil fuels. But the straw harmed furnaces so they devised ways to treat it, which led researchers to find natural enzymes that break down the rough fibers in the straw. This inspired the idea to make fuel from this type of plant matter.

So, how is it done?
First straw is soaked in water and the cooked at around 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The resulting mash is fed into a large, cylindrical tank. The enzymes are added, and after about six hours, the mixture is mostly liquid.The liquid if full of sugars which can be fermented using yeast. After fermentation, the liquid is distilled into ethanol that is then added to gasoline.

Inbicon said that a proper commercial plant would need to be ten times the size of the demonstration site that IPR visited. The company started started making licensing deals to sell the technology worldwide.

Criticism
It all sounds wonderful, right? Not everyone is convinced, though. Jan-Erik Petersen, a bio-energy specialist with the European Environmental Agency in Copenhagen says it will be very difficult to scale up second generation biofuel production by 2020. He blames biological and transportation difficulties as two main obstables.

He also points out that the amount of energy per unit is small and it would be difficult to gather all material in one plant to have an efficient process.

Elsewhere, Bob Howarth at Cornell University says he and his colleagues don’t understand why society is focused on ethanol and that second generation is not a good fuel. He believes it’s better to just burn feedstock material to co-generate heat and electricity.

But Inbicon is convinced that the technology, that could also use garbage as feedstock, can be made viable both financially and environmentally. Humanity needs to steer itself away from fossil fuels, therefore the real question is: can we afford not to try out new methods of producing fuel and energy? What do you think? Does second-generation biofuel appear to be a good solution?

Article by Antonio Pasolini, a Brazilian writer and video art curator based in London, UK. He holds a BA in journalism and an MA in film and television.

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The European Union will exceed its target of meeting 20 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2020, according to a new report. Twenty-five of the 27 EU nations will meet or exceed their national targets, according to the analysis by the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA).

About 14 percent of the total energy demand will be met through wind energy, more than any other renewable source, with Ireland projected to generate 36.4 percent of its energy from wind by 2020 and Denmark producing 31 percent, according to the analysis. The other top sources of renewable energy are hydropower (10.5 percent), biomass (6.6 percent), and solar photovoltaic (2.7 percent). Italy and Luxembourg, the only nations projected to not meet their national standards, plan to import renewable energy to make up for the shortfall.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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Denmark, like, Germany, her neighbor to the south, is a country that takes renewable energy seriously. The wind energy industry alone in Denmark is booming with companies like Vestas and Siemens Wind Power both having production facilities and bases of operation on Danish soil. Denmark’s own wind based energy also grows exponentially each year leaving many optimistic that the nation might be one of the few who can achieve 100% renewable energy in the next several decades. However, wind based renewable energy is not the only kind of clean energy the country has going for it. In one location, Denmark has proven that wind and hydrogen can be king when it comes to being green.

Called the Lolland Hydrogen Community, the project began in the middle of 2007 as a way of taking the excess wind energy produced by the island community and putting it to use. Since they were generating an impressive fifty percent more wind energy than was needed, they set about finding a way to convert that excess wind into hydrogen for use in powering the island and acting as way to demonstrate to Europe the viability of hydrogen as a renewable energy source. The way the project began was with the installation of a Fuel Cell Combined Heat and Power plant that took the wind energy that was being produced in excess and using it to power an electrolyser that worked to separate the oxygen and hydrogen molecules that comprised water. Once the hydrogen is separated it is stored in pressure tanks and it is then used to power fuel cells that provide the community with electricity.

Although powering the community’s power grid with the hydrogen fuel cells proved to be a success the Lolland Hydrogen Community knew they could take the renewable energy a step forward. To achieve this end, the researchers on the community developed smaller hydrogen fuel cells that could be placed in a home and act similar to a boiler in order to provide heating, air, and energy. In 2008, five houses in the village of Nakskov were chosen to have the smaller fuel cells installed in them in order to determine if they would be effective. Nearly three years later, the Lolland Hydrogen Community is now looking into installing them in over forty more homes.

In the end, the Lolland Hydrogen Community serves as an example to the rest of Europe that 100% renewable energy is indeed possible. With the unique blend of both hydrogen based fuel cell power and wind energy the power that is generated easily powers the entire community. Based off the example being set in Nakskov and in Lolland, it would not be surprising to see the blueprint used in the future to convert further communities over to a fully renewable infrastructure.

Article by Richard Cooke, appearing courtesy Justmeans.

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Just over a week ago, Denmark became the first European country to make available to drivers second generation biofuel, fuel made of agricultural residues that do not compete with food crops. The fuel, called Bio95, is now on offer at 100 filling stations across the country on a 95% gas, 5% biofuel blend.

Bio95 is made from wheat straw collected after harvest in Denmark and is produced by a company called DONG Inbicon with enzyme technology by Novozymes.

“Long a grand vision of the future, next-generation biofuel is now coming to market to fulfil its promises. The industry has delivered and we’re now sending a strong signal to policy-makers that their support for this exciting technology is required if all our citizens are to benefit from it,” said Steen Riisgaard, CEO of Novozymes.

A recent study released by Bloomberg said second-generation biofuel could generate up to one million jobs in the European Union over the next decade, mainly in rural areas and replace up to 62% of imported gasoline. The report also claims that second generation biofuels could cut down road transport emissions by 50% until 2020. But a set of policies need to be put in place in order for that to happen, the report added, such as the creation of an ambitious mandate for second-generation bio fuel, incentives for the collection of farming residues and tax breaks for investments.

Article by Antonio Pasolini, a Brazilian writer and video art curator based in London, UK. He holds a BA in journalism and an MA in film and television.

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In the United States, even the most basic programs for encouraging renewable energy and sustainable business have a hard time making it through Congress. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, western European countries are lining up to demonstrate that how industrialized nations can build up their economies with renewable power. Justmeans has already covered some of the major sustainable business innovations in countries like Portugal, Italy, and Germany. Now it seems as if Denmark could become the next European nation to take up a true leadership roll in the transition to clean energy sources.

Today, Denmark’s Commission on Climate Change Policy is set to publish a report on the potential for repowering Denmark with non-fossil fuel based energy. Yet even though it hasn’t yet been officially released, media sources are already picking up the story that the report will recommend a shift to 100% renewable energy by the year 2050. The Commission on Climate Change apparently feels wind energy holds the most potential for development—and that makes sense, considering Denmark is a peninsula nation with vast offshore wind resources. The report also advises meeting a significant portion of Denmark’s energy demand with biofuels.

To be sure, Denmark is hardly a stranger to sustainable business and initiatives designed to reduce fossil fuel consumption. The city of Copenhagen is widely known as one of the most bicycle-friendly urban centers in the world, and the Danish company Vestas is an important player in the international wind energy market. Denmark’s island of Samso is already powered completely by renewable energy sources. Yet to make a complete break with fossil fuels, the national government will need to do even more.

Specifically, the Commission on Climate Change recommends Denmark channel half a percentage point of its GDP into developing renewable energy. It also lays out forty suggestions for measures the country should take to encourage sustainable business. These recommendations include further developing offshore wind resources, making more efficient buildings that cut back on ratepayer electricity bills, and investigating new sources of alternative energy. By following these guidelines, the report maintains, Denmark can sever ties with fossil fuels within the next four decades.

Of course recommendations do not necessarily translate into action, and the onus is now on the Danish government to translate proposals into policy. This November Denmark will release a new strategy to reduce climate change and ramp up domestic renewable energy—and the government will hopefully incorporate the Climate Change Commission’s suggestions into its strategy. If this happens, Denmark may solidify its position as a leader in the increasingly competitive clean tech field. It will also up the stakes for countries like the United States, which have yet to make such a concrete commitment to sustainable business.

Article by Nick Engelfried, appearing courtesy Justmeans.

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Twelve years ago in Kyoto, the world was poised to act on a climate treaty but looked for a clear signal from the United States. Now, with the Copenhagen talks set to begin, the outcome once again hinges on what the U.S. is prepared to do.

President Obama took much of the drama out of the Copenhagen talks earlier this month when he and other world leaders announced that there’d be no treaty at the end — in essence, they said, we’ll wait for the U.S. Senate. Still, you can’t call off the party entirely, and so the planet’s climate scientists, bureaucrats, activists, skeptics and journalists will still descend on the Danish capital in a few days for a fortnight of meeting, marching, propounding, denying, and most of all spinning.

Almost all of what happens will be murky (and not just because Copenhagen in December averages 45 minutes of sunlight daily). Without the focus provided by the need to draw up a real document, much of the tension may go out of the proceedings — minus a deadline it’s hard to push to resolution on anything. And yet it’s the fate of the world being discussed: as British negotiator Ed Miliband put it, “Bretton Woods plus Yalta multiplied by Reykjavik.” We’ll see some kind of paper signed, but it won’t commit anyone to much of anything — the talks will lurch forward into next year. Most of what occurs in Denmark will be shadow boxing, feeling each other out.

And so here are a few of the places that bear watching, to see if some kind of consensus develops over the course of the proceedings:

• What’s the science really saying? For almost five years, the consensus position of those who cared about producing a treaty has been that we’re struggling to avoid a temperature rise greater than two degrees, and that to do that we’ll need to limit atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to less than 450 parts per million. These sound like the kind of eye-glazing numbers that journalists try to avoid — but the vast and slow-moving bureaucracy of the climate negotiations process has adopted them as the goal, and most of the proposals on the table are geared to reaching (or plausibly approaching) those targets.
• The problem is, that’s not good science any more. After the rapid melt of Arctic sea ice in the summer of 2007, researchers recalibrated. A NASA team said that the right figure is 350 — that anything more is not compatible with “the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” That assertion has been backed up by no less than Rajendra Pachauri, the UN’s chief scientist, who has gotten grief for saying — most recently in an interview with Yale Environment 360 — that 350 is where we need to go. Ninety-two of the poorest nations on Earth have officially signed on to that target, and at the moment it’s still in the negotiating text, albeit in a preamble about a “shared vision” for the future.

  The problem, of course, is that meeting a 350 target goes far beyond anything the Obama administration, much less the Senate, or the Chinese, or many of the other big players, are currently contemplating. We now know that Obama will arrive on Dec. 9 en route to Oslo, and that he will offer roughly a 17 percent cut in 2005 emissions levels by 2020. That would be about a zero percent cut from 1990 levels; in other words, not very ambitious — the absolute minimum for saving face, but not enough to save the world.

  Poor nations are starting to realize how badly they’re going to be hit by climate change.

  Going further would be fundamentally disruptive — it would mean not incremental change but a wartime footing. So the question of which science you embrace is really a proxy for how much you’re willing to do. And in this case “political realists” are the opposite of “scientific realists.” If you’re figuring the odds, there will more politicians than scientists on hand in Copenhagen.

• How tough will the developing countries be? Since Obama’s announcement that he will go to Copenhagen robbed journalists of their first cliffhanger, the next is likely to be whether the most vulnerable nations walk out on the proceedings. Here’s Mohammed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, whose country sets aside money in its budget each year in case it needs to buy a new homeland when its current one sinks beneath the waves, talking about what a 2 degree Celsius temperature increase would mean: “At two degrees we would lose the coral reefs. At 2 degrees we would melt Greenland. At 2 degrees my country would not survive.” He called the proposals from the big players a “suicide pact” and pledged to try and stop them. “As a president I cannot accept this. As a person I cannot accept this. I refuse to believe that it is too late, and that we cannot do anything about it.”

  Nasheed rallied a dozen of the most vulnerable nations earlier this month at a summit in his capital of Male. And virtually every poor nation is starting to realize how badly they’re going to be hit by climate change: The vulnerability of Andean glaciers, Asian monsoons, African rainfall patterns become clearer with each passing year. But the pressure from the rich nations — and indeed from some of the big environmental groups — not to be a skunk at the garden party will be intense. And it will come with sums of money attached — the kind of money that traditionally has been enough to buy off the anger of the poor world.

  The idea of the U.S. meeting anything like its moral obligation seems small.

• Which leads to the next obvious question — just how much money will be on the table? The sums required are staggering. The World Bank recently estimated that keeping temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius would mean spending $140 to $675 billion a year in the developing countries — which, after all, will only be developing if they keep figuring out how to acquire more energy. And adaptation — dealing with the effects of the climate change we can’t prevent — would run another $75 billion a year (an estimate that other research paints as extremely optimistic).

  Sums like that are not on offer. The Europeans have talked about a deal in the range of $100 billion a year, but that depends on the Americans ponying up, and so far the U.S. has been as coy about its willingness to pay as about its willingness to rein in emissions. Everyone outside the U.S. knows that this is — overwhelmingly — a problem we’ve caused; since the carbon molecule has a residence time of over a century in the atmosphere, it will be the decades before the Chinese, despite their vastly larger numbers, are as responsible for climate change as Americans. But if Obama puts a realistic number on the table, Senator James Inhofe (R-Armageddon) will be on hand to take it off. (Inhofe originally announced he was going to Denmark as a “one-man truth squad,” but then added John Barasso (R-WY) and “a secret person” to his delegation). In our poisonous politics, the idea of the U.S. meeting anything like its moral obligation seems small — and without that, the politics gets harder for everyone else in the world.

And then there are the plumbing questions. How do you monitor and then enforce any agreement? How do you draw something up that doesn’t require treaty approval by the U.S. Senate (no one thinks there are 67 votes for a real climate policy)? How do you give credit for actions already taken? How do you keep carbon trading from turning into one more Wall Street boondoggle?

One thing will surely be tested: whether civil society is capable of really pushing the process. Activists will be descending from all directions, but the deck is stacked against them: The conference center, where the media will be mostly cooped up, is miles from town. And the environmentalists themselves are deeply split. There are groups that, for all intents and purposes, are part of the negotiations — whose experts have spent careers working on one part of the treaty or another, and are deeply invested in its success. There are less formal groups — many of them veterans of the anti-globalization movement — determined to shut down the whole process. They won’t succeed, but it’s completely conceivable that tear gas will drift across the Radhuspladsen before the month is out. And there are thousands of young people, about to be disillusioned by their first exposure to big time power politics.

Having been to Kyoto (which at least took place in the daylight) there’s a sense of overwhelming déjà vu as I head toward Denmark. There, too, most of the world was lined up to do something, but waiting on a signal from the U.S., whose negotiators had been doing its best to weaken the treaty in hopes it might pass Senate muster. There was the same will-he-come anxiety, then centered on Al Gore, who flew in at the last minute to offer some small concessions and let the conference proceed. In those days China hadn’t yet emerged as a huge carbon source. In those days the Arctic hadn’t yet melted. But in those days, as in this one, everyone was waiting on the U.S.

Author Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. His The End of Nature, published in 1989, is regarded as the first book for a general audience on global warming. He is a founder of 350.org, a campaign to spread the goal of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million worldwide. His most recent book is American Earth, an anthology of American environmental writing.

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360

[photo: indrasensi]

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We are living in a world where high consumption has been relentlessly praised, suggesting that we should buy, consume and dispose more stuff than our grandparents used to do. With some nations consuming more than others, the quality and quantity of waste varies across borders. And so does the way it is managed.

A conventional method for waste management is to dump the waste into designated landfill areas where it is left for years without being monitored. Landfill activity remains the most commonly used organized waste disposal method in the world. It is also the easiest and the cheapest. However, brimful landfill sites, hazardous waste and uncontrolled greenhouse gases cause greater environmental and economical impacts. As a simple example, part of the carbon content of the waste when it is dumped into a landfill site, is emitted into the atmosphere in the form of methane, which has a greenhouse effect 20 times greater than that of CO2.

The European Landfill Directive, which was issued in 1999, aims to prevent and reduce the negative effects of landfills on the environment and human health while regulating waste disposal activities in the member states. Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium have already banned disposal of untreated waste in landfills. Alternatively, these countries together with a bunch of other countries, have begun to implement Waste-to-Energy systems.

Waste-to-Energy is the process of extracting heat or electricity from waste sources. The energy extraction can be done through thermal processes (incineration, gasification, pyrolysis or carbonization), biological processes (unaerobic digestion, fermentation) or mechanical biological treatments.

The content and the calorific values of the waste vary in different countries. Plastic bags, food packages and high density plastic materials have higher calorific value per weight thus being more useful for incineration. On the other hand, more organic content or papers are more suitable for biological processes.

I would like to focus on waste incineration as it is currently the most commonly used Waste-to-Energy method. Austria, where I live, has already adopted waste incineration by building 9 plants. About a quarter of the residents in Vienna are supplied by the heat produced from the incineration of municipality waste at 3 different plants. Spittelau Fernwärme in Vienna is probably the most photographed Waste-to-Energy plant in the world because of its famous design by the famous architect Hundertwasser. The 40-year-old building can convert 880,000 tons of waste into heat that supplies 290,000 Viennese apartments through a total pipeline length of 1,000 km. Another incineration plant, Pffaffenau, burns 250,000 tons of waste each year, while supplying district heating to 50,000 households and additionally supplying electricity to 25,000 subscribers.

Denmark ranks first in incinerated waste per capita, as can be observed from the graph. On average, the Danes rank among the nations with the highest consumption rate; nevertheless they are doing good in recycling and reusing waste energy. There are 30 Waste-to-Energy facilities in Denmark. Eurostat datas show that 55 % of Danish municipal waste per capita is incinerated.

According to the Danish Energy Agency, the calorific value of 4 tons waste would equal to 1 tons of oil or 1.6 tons of coal. The incineration of 1 ton of waste produces approximately 2,000 kWh of heat and 670 kWh of electricity. Considering the fact that waste is a local resource and partially consists of biomass, waste incineration appears to be a better and cleaner option.

The potential saving of conventional resources would result in a decrease of greenhouse gas emissions. The emission from a waste incineration plant is less than half that of a coal-powered plant and it is slightly less than that of a gas powered plant.  The content of the exhaust air complies strictly with environmental standards whereas most of the district heating incineration plants are located in the heart of the cities. The hazardous waste (eg. mercury containing wastes, solvents, acids etc.) is treated in a way that the environmental impact is eliminated. At the end of the incineration process, everything, except the metals which are later to-be-recycled, are transformed into ash which can be used in the construction sector.

Waste incineration is a waste treatment method which helps us reduce the environmental impacts of landfill sites, yet it generates heat and electricity as a side-benefit. I recommend reducing our waste generation rather than treating waste as a resource. Initiating a wider plan for municipal waste treatment methods through sharing, lobbying or creating resources is a valuable contribution. Nevertheless, reducing, reusing and recycling are the most important initial steps in order to create a sustainable economy.

[data sources: Eurostat and EPA; photo credit: Flickr; graph by author]

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