Can the energy management and the waste management be harmonized?

Abstract

One of the biggest tasks of the environmental science is creating more economic and environmentally friendly energy sources. The enormously increasing amounts of waste material are also a huge challenge for the environmental protection. These previously mentioned problems can be treated in a harmonized way. The uneven energy consumption requires peaks in the production of energy. The energy consumption is higher in winter than in summer in northern part of Europe. Such a seasonal deviation of energy consumption can be compensated with the waste burning in winter during the cold weather. The significant portions of municipal wastes are burnable and hardly biological degradable (e.g. polyurethane, PET, PVC, PE, etc.). Moreover several types of them cannot be recirculated. The plastic materials can be used for energy production. The invention of our proposal is the plastic waste materials have to be collected and stored during the less energy consuming period, and burn them when the energy requirements are high. The selected burnable waste can be collected during the whole year period, and stored in compressed forms. The abandoned open cast mines are appropriate for such depots. In this way the consumption of fossil fuel will significantly be reduced and the waste stream decreased. Several alternative ways are also shown for the use of plastic waste.