All Amsterdam trams run on 'garbage power' as well as all the street lighting. Even the electricity used in public buildings is waste-generated.
AEB, the energy company run by Amsterdam city council, is the biggest power plant in the world to be run entirely on waste. What's more; AEB claims it's the best of its kind because it gets nearly 50 percent more energy out of the waste than its competitors.
Because no fossil fuel, such as coal or gas, is needed for the production of all this power, the plant substantially reduces Amsterdam's CO2 emissions; 350,000 tonnes annually.
And there is one more bonus; because even the ashes from the ovens are recycled, for instance in building materials, only one percent of all Amsterdam's rubbish remains, making landfill sites virtually unnecessary.
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This is quite an achievement, imagine how much we could reduce the garbage landfills if every town would have it's own rubbish fed power station. People can be so silly sometimes, we have the technology to manage one of our biggest problems but few actually do something about it, I don't see why we should keep paying for fossil fuels when we could use our own garbage to produce the power we need instead. The DC trash pickup collects a considerable amount of my trash each week, I would feel much better to know that some of it can be reused like this.
This would clearly be a viable solution for us, Is any one currently involved in africa or South Africa ???
Does anyone know if this is being done in the USA? With so much open land and so little regulation planning, I think the USA will continue filling landfills for many years until there is no open land remaining.
This is an example of sound initiative in environmental matters: cost-effective, reliable and workable - unlike the anti-car policy that has taken over Amsterdam local government in past 20 years with scandalously high parking fees, annoying traffic patterns schemes and lack of public parking in Downtown.
Well...what are we waiting for? Obviously it can be done, so lets do it.
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