Green Garbage Power On St Patrick's Day
Tomorrow is St Patrick's Day and for me, as with all Irishman, it's a special day. Many Irish people wear green of course on St Patrick's Day but there's another type of 'green' which is becoming increasingly associated with the day. Know what it is? Curious?
Well, my company manufactures and supplies sonic horns around the world and one of the new and growing areas of interest for our innovative acoustic cleaning horns is that of waste to energy plants. These plants process unwanted garbage or bio-fuel into electricity and thus make our environment and energy production sources much 'greener'. In a waste to energy plant, the ash from burning the garbage or bio-fuel is sticky and is readily deposited on heat exchange surfaces. These deposits can in turn reduce efficiency and result in costly downtime. This is where our acoustic horns come in. How and why do they work so well in waste to energy plants? You can click here to read more.
So what's that to do with St Patrick's Day? Well the 'Paddy's Day' Parade in New York is a great source of municipal garbage for the local waste to energy plant! So much so that it's now referred to by the New York Dept of Sanitation as 'parade garbage'!
Here's how it goes along with some fascinating statistics ....
Approx 1/2 million people gather at New York's Paddy's Day Parade, generating 50T of garbage that has to be cleaned up afterwards.
A contingent from the New York Dept of Sanitation (which can draw on no less than 7,900 workers and 6,000 vehicles!) moves in to collect the garbage.
A convoy of 400 garbage trucks loaded with all the parade garbage makes its way 10 miles down the road to a waste to energy plant in Newark, New Jersey - one of the biggest waste to energy plants in the world, processing 2,700T of garbage every day.
The parade garbage is transferred to the plant to process. It has to be dried out first of all (in something akin to a gigantic airing cupboard) because it's usually soggy from all the beer cans! Why do this? Because it's difficult to generate electricity from wet garbage. The drying process takes around 7 days.
The dried garbage is then fed into 3 incinerators which reach over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (around 1,200 degrees Celsius) and which together can process over 100T of garbage per hour. Ash tumbles down a series of rollers and any metal is extracted by magnets.
The heat generated by the incinerators heats a huge boiler which acts somewhat like a giant kettle, generating over 200,000lbs (95,000 kg) of steam every hour.
The steam is piped up to a turbine room where it spins the turbines in 2 x 35 Megawatt units which are connected to the electricity grid.
The previously discarded, 50T of wet garbage that entered the plant leaves as ash residue, having provided 1.5 million Kilowatt hours of electricity for the local power grid.
Now that's what I call a truly 'green' effect for St Paddy's Day!
Well, my company manufactures and supplies sonic horns around the world and one of the new and growing areas of interest for our innovative acoustic cleaning horns is that of waste to energy plants. These plants process unwanted garbage or bio-fuel into electricity and thus make our environment and energy production sources much 'greener'. In a waste to energy plant, the ash from burning the garbage or bio-fuel is sticky and is readily deposited on heat exchange surfaces. These deposits can in turn reduce efficiency and result in costly downtime. This is where our acoustic horns come in. How and why do they work so well in waste to energy plants? You can click here to read more.
So what's that to do with St Patrick's Day? Well the 'Paddy's Day' Parade in New York is a great source of municipal garbage for the local waste to energy plant! So much so that it's now referred to by the New York Dept of Sanitation as 'parade garbage'!
Here's how it goes along with some fascinating statistics ....
A contingent from the New York Dept of Sanitation (which can draw on no less than 7,900 workers and 6,000 vehicles!) moves in to collect the garbage.
A convoy of 400 garbage trucks loaded with all the parade garbage makes its way 10 miles down the road to a waste to energy plant in Newark, New Jersey - one of the biggest waste to energy plants in the world, processing 2,700T of garbage every day.
The parade garbage is transferred to the plant to process. It has to be dried out first of all (in something akin to a gigantic airing cupboard) because it's usually soggy from all the beer cans! Why do this? Because it's difficult to generate electricity from wet garbage. The drying process takes around 7 days.
The dried garbage is then fed into 3 incinerators which reach over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (around 1,200 degrees Celsius) and which together can process over 100T of garbage per hour. Ash tumbles down a series of rollers and any metal is extracted by magnets.
The heat generated by the incinerators heats a huge boiler which acts somewhat like a giant kettle, generating over 200,000lbs (95,000 kg) of steam every hour.
The steam is piped up to a turbine room where it spins the turbines in 2 x 35 Megawatt units which are connected to the electricity grid.
The previously discarded, 50T of wet garbage that entered the plant leaves as ash residue, having provided 1.5 million Kilowatt hours of electricity for the local power grid.
Now that's what I call a truly 'green' effect for St Paddy's Day!
Labels: garbage recycling, green, power plants, st patricks day, waste to energy
posted by DFC at
6:00 AM
