This story was told in a story circle at the Learning History workshop in February 2008.
Read how one officer finds out more about a new compact Pyrolysis system that could transform waste management in the future.
Pyrolysis Paradise - A glimpse of a sustainable future.
a story from the Incensed by Sustainability story circle
So I am sitting at my desk late about 6 o'clock one night. I get a call from a guy who says he is an entrepreneur and he is developing a new type of pyrolysis system, which in theory should be able to eat our sort of black household binbags of rubbish. And he says, “I can't show you this thing yet, but would it be alright if I could phone you in about 2 years time when I have got it sorted?” So I say, “Yea, fine, ok whatever” and I forgot about it.
Then sure enough about 18 months later and again at the end of the day 6 o'clock in the evening he called me and I did remember him and he said, “Okay, I have got this machine up and running in Wiltshire and I am throwing crushed up scaffolding planks and plastic bottles and things into it and I am getting a good biogas flame out the other end, do you want to come and see it?”
So, I went down and saw it and thought “this is very-very interesting”. Then I took a couple of scientist guys down who looked at this and said “this is very interesting”. Then I took down the people who own a waste transfer plant, they crush up buildings and they demolish buildings and crush up the rubble and they pull out all the stuff that they can recycle. And they are still left with bales of compacted kind of manky wood insulation materials, scraps of plastic and that sort of thing. They are sending them to landfills and this is costing them huge amount of money each year.
So, they are looking for a pyrolysis system which can deal with this and I sent them down to look at this system. And they were so impressed that they are buying 2 of them and should have these things up and running by the end of May 2008. And then we are going to cool down the biogas methane coming out the back end and put it into bottles and ship it out across the other side of Mitcham common. They will be used as a fuel to drive the CHP for the Crest-Nicholson development: that’s 250 homes, a Doctor’s surgery and a community centre. That is the theory!
The beauty of this system is that it solves a lot of problems from the municipal deployment point of view. It is not like the compact power pyrolysis system which is great big Heath Robinson, inefficient, but hugely expensive machine, which can only pay its way by eating clinical waste which has a gate fee of £200 a tonne. This system is modular; it uses an electrical system to bake the waste…. and basically it is benign so you can deploy this quietly and discreetly around your Borough.
Storycircle Member: I was going to ask you about local opinion, they don’t know even know it is there?
Well they
are going to have to go through the planning process. We have talked to the environment agency and as far they are concern there is
no problem – it is just silent. No burning of flames - you just pull an
electrical current out of the grid, and it bakes this stuff like an electric
oven. It has got these patented systems in it, pulls off the methane gas, bits
of charcoal things like that. It is 1unit electrical energy to run the process,
15 units of green electrical energy from the CHP driving assistant; If it is
set up and running it goes 24/7 to the next 6 months, that’s the silver bullet.
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