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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • It is profitable right now and has been for a long time, anywhere in the world. What’s lacking is knowledge that it could be profitable and investment will.

    Take the US as an example. You get about 550 kWh of electricity per ton of burnt waste, that’s $20-30 per ton. And If you’d have district heating, which only a few places do you’d get a lot more.

    But counting low. $20 per ton, multiplied by ~150 million tons of trash per year and you get 3 billion dollars per year that you’re burying instead of just burning.

    Now this isn’t even accounting for the fact that about 20% of that is plastic, and that plastic is worth anywhere from 1 cent to 70 cents per pound. Let’s really lowball it and say that it’s worth $5 cents per pound on average. That’s $100 per ton. That multiplied by by the roughly 30 million tons of plastic that goes to landfills is worth another 3 billion. And we’re not even discussing metals, paper glass and all the other things that have surprisingly great value.

    And let’s discuss compost. Here in Sweden we have a separate bin for that. It’s all collected and the methane is collected and sold as well as the nutrient compost when it’s done.

    Yes! Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! But people aren’t doing that and the slogan has had very limited impact in the last 53 years.