Comments about ‘Utah Legislature: Measure may open door to garbage as energy source’

I guess if a big company like Johnson and Johnson have been doing it for years. We can do it too....

Where to the emissions go? Layton? South Weber? Clearfield? Who monitors what trash is being incinerated? Who benefits from the electricity that is being generated? It has been known for some time that HAFB is the recipient of the majority of electricity, so I do not see how is the benefiting the rest of the community?

WIWMD has the money and support from the Davis County Commission as well as the contracts from local waste haulers. The sad thing is, because WIWMD is getting so much trash, at times, it is landfilled anyway.

There is a lot of money in this package if it passes but its only the surrounding neighborhoods that pay the ultimate price, the people don't benefit from this at all. To many health issues already exist in the areas around the burn plant to begin with. It will be a sad day when this passes. Don't get me wrong, I am all about renewable energy, but not from this source.

One day soon we'll begin seeing this kind of energy production at the neighborhood scale. Small anaerobic digesters and other devices that will take all of our wastestream and create energy from the bits that aren't recycled. Would be nice to see more local investment in these ideas, as we could end up with a manufacturing opportunity. This is great progress. Would like to see a more in depth story in DN.

Set up correctly the emissions can be scrubed before hitting the air. So what if HAFB is the recipiant. That means that the energy they receive from burning garbage is that much less they need from the power grid overall. It also means what is burned is not taking up so much space in the landfills. Therefore everyone benifits.

I lived in Hawaii for a number of years and they burned municipal waste as a form of energy and it worked well. That was over 20 years ago and it was not new then. I never could understand why this practice is not used more often.

I hope this becomes more of the trend here and in other places.

It's trading land pollution for air pollution. It is a good idea that needs to be made clean before it is a great idea.

Many products can be recycled, such as metal, plastics, paper and cardboard. It would be a waste of resources to just burn these items; they need to be separated from the waste stream first, and recycled. By recycling these products we can save much more energy, as it uses about 1/10 the energy to recover and make new products from these items compared to manufacturing them from scratch.
Plus burning plastic has the potential to give off dioxin, an extremely hazardous substance. As long as a good sorting process is in place before the material is burnt, it might work - but recyclable material needs to be pulled first.

Can you imagine how toxic the air would become if we were to burn all the plastic that is in landfills? Stick to big oil. If it's not broke--don't fix it.

Perhaps unemployed workers can be hired to help separate the trash into reusable and what can be burned. Convicts could also stay occupied doing the same stuff. Scrubbers can clean most of the potential air polution. Also, as this technology is developed, we will probably find more and better ways to utilize this resource. Garbage as a resource! What a great idea. It's win, win, win,all the way around.

I am from Michigan and there is a town there that created a ski hill out of a landfill. Keep in mind there are no mountains in Michigan like here. So town built this hill, piled it high, covered it with dirt, and put a ski lift on it. People love it. Best part is, the put pipes under the trash to collect the methane that it produces, collect it and sell it, making more money. I remember that when I lived there, the school got all sorts of stuff from the revenue, and the fire department got all new trucks. Sounds like a win win kind of thing to me.

Let’s see — an inexhaustible resource used by a process that can produce clean energy that has been shown successful elsewhere. What’s the downside? I no longer live in Utah; I live where we do recycle. Plastics do not go out with the regular household trash. I have lived here long enough now that it seems really weird to me, when visiting Utah, to not recycle. The technology is easily available. This seems like a no-brainer to me.

There have been so many issues with the Davis Burn Plant that it isn't even funny. Mercury emissions. PCB emissions. Not able to meet the air pollution limits they got, so they got higher limits (in stead of cleaning up their emissions). Josh is right - burn all that plastic, mercury switches, and other junk, and someone downwind will pay. With that in mind, if it is set up, it ought to be upwind of the capitol building - at least then we'll all know what they've been smokin.

Reclassifying municipal waste as a renewable energy source could give it some tax breaks (if I understand correctly), making the existing facility more economic. So I think there is a definite advantage for those pushing for the reclassification. I'd like to see more detailed coverage of this bill as well.

I think this is a good idea, assuming emissions are appropriately controlled. Even if plastics aren't separated and recycled, at least their energy value (which is typically much higher than other components of municipal waste) is utilized, rather than just taking up landfill space.

Waste incineration to generate electricity is practiced in Europe (e.g. Italy). Regulatory restrictions (such as the one addressed in this bill) and more land available for landfills have limited its economic feasibility in the western U.S. With better economics, the existing facility would hopefully be able to process more waste using better emissions controls, as needed.