Burning trash takes up less space than burying it, so for crowded places like the industrial cities of China, incineration is an attractive waste management option.  As a bonus, the heat energy thrown off by converting trash to ash can be used to make electricity from a free and reliable fuel source.  But this low-tech, two-for-one benefit is not always the heroic solution it appears to be.

Poorly designed incinerators are dirty contraptions.  They pile up toxic ash and can foul the air with dangerous pollutants such as dioxin.  And according to this New York Times article, although incinerators have the heaviest impact on the health of people living around them, some of their pollutants can carry across oceans.  That makes them everyone’s problem.

Convincing a nation to internalize the cost of effective environmental regulation is a tough sell.  Lax standards are a socio-economic phenomenon.  The focus on increasing income and economic prosperity in developing countries usually takes precedence over environmental stewardship.  Yet technology has the potential to allow both to coexist by creating better ways to deal with waste.

High temperature gasification delivers the energy benefits of traditional waste-to-energy processes, but does so more efficiently and more cleanly than traditional incinerators can.  The gasification reaction converts feedstock to carbon monoxide and hydrogen at elevated temperatures.  This discourages the formation of the most toxic byproducts.  The process also uses minimal oxygen to more fully consume the feedstock and to increase the amount of usable energy that can extracted.

Waste-to-energy can be a viable win-win solution, but doing it responsibly requires the conviction to invest in new technology.