The best argument against State's Rights is when they’re objectively this stupid in the face of convincing evidence. Time for Congress to give the EPA the authority to mandate these or some such action.

I'm not sure what the random bolding is ever about, but the bad reputation of incinerators stems from incinerator technology of old being pretty bad, before we learned about preventing dioxin release and whatnot. The state of the art is now much better.

Granted, I don't think we make good/rational choices about risk as a nation; we're still burning coal to produce electricity.

How about not producing the trash in the first place?

Religious environmentalists will sink this country right along with the tea-baggers. Incinerators, and nuclear have changed a lot in 40 years. But you can't convince the prius owning vegan cloth bag crowd because they *just know* these things are evil.

@3, they claim to scrub or filter out dioxins and other toxics.

That gal from the NYPIRG has never heard of "the perfect is the enemy of the good", has she? "Our priority is pushing for zero waste", she says. But that's ridiculous on the face of it, no matter how much recycling you do. And in fact cleanly burning waste for electricity IS recycling just as much or more as turning aluminum cans into new aluminum cans or whatever -- all recycling processes use power and generate waste and gases. Laura Haight thinks she's working for "the public" but she is an enemy of the people.

“Negative public perception” pretty much explains why we never get anything done (or half-done in the case of healthcare). Never mind all that "science" stuff that's proven time and again that item X is better than the status quo. By all means, listen to the people who have an axe to grind who tell you that item X will convert your babies into homosexual, grandma-terminating, business-killing cannibals. They know what they're talking about. Wasn't there a time when scientists were actually respected?

Ah, democracy.

Sure burning things to produce energy isn't the ideal solution, but it seems that we're still fixated on unyielding idealism (at the two extremes, unchecked growth vs. environmentalism) when what we really need is immediate pragmatism. It seems like we're going to have to make more choices like this in the future when it comes to climate change and doing something is almost always better than doing nothing or holding out for the "ideal" solution.

Well Fuck Seattle for sending their trash to Oregon.

Screw it. Give one of these companies a contract to build a waste-conversion burner, and the moment people see the drop in both their trash and energy costs, they'll flock to it like crows to a pigeon carcass.

Except of course for teh tea-baggers, who will assume pretty much exactly what @8 said...

I don't know about other Americans, but I want the "Mr. Fusion" of Back to the Future Part 2, that ran on beer and old banana peels.

I like the fact that our refuse goes to Oregon.

Fuck the Ducks!

Seattle Steam is commissioning a Biomass Boiler, which will generate heat from wood scraps in the City's yard waste bins. It's not garbage, but it is waste.

It's already built - you can see it down on Western @ the University Steps.

convert waste it into heat and electricity so efficiently that residential fireplaces and barbecues produce more air pollutants than the plants themselves.

That doesn't seem all that impressive, since it's hard to imagine that anything produces more airborne filth than residential fireplaces.

You can sum up the problem of America with two sentences from that article:

(1) "Matt Hale, director of the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, said the reasons that waste-to-energy plants had not caught on nationally were the relative abundance of cheap landfills in a large country, **opposition from state officials who feared the plants could undercut recycling programs** and a “negative public perception.”

and (2) "Many countries that are expanding waste-to-energy capacity, like Denmark and Germany, typically also have the highest recycling rates; only the material that cannot be recycled is burned."

... In other words, us Americans can't do this because we are too busy doing everything so damn well.

Uh-huh

I always thought the worst part of incinerator was that the ash is toxin concentrate which is really hard to dispose of.

@14 is correct -- saying that something produces less pollution than an open wood fire isn't saying much.

The main danger from trash burning plants that is hard to mitigate is the particulate pollution. Just as a general matter, the particulate pollution in Europe is much much worse than anyplace I've been in the United States. You get off a train in Glasgow or Paris, the air quality is worse than New York or Chicago -- pretty much anyplace I've been except L.A.

Particulate pollution isn't really a problem from a greenhouse gas perspective, but it's a real problem from a human health angle. It causes all kinds of diseases, including cancer.

@7 Exactly. I have to constantly tell people in nuclear power debates that altho nuclear power does create scary waste, the status quo creates tons more and straight into the air or into the water, not isolated in a mountain. Their desire for no waste blinds them from seeing steps towards that.

More clueless environmentalists. (Laura Haight)

What else is new?

@16, as opposed to those same toxins just sort of hanging around, leaching into the soil? Why are concentrated toxin filters harder to dispose of than oceans of toxin-rich trash?