Power, Dr Emmett Brown's way

When Doc Brown returns from the future to collect Marty - to sort out his kids - they have no need for plutonium to generate one-point-twenty-one jigowatts of power necessary for time travel . He merely flips open the fusion-o-matic hatch on the back of his De Lorean and feeds it with scraps from the dustbin (No idea what I'm talking about? Really!? see Back to the Future).

In 1985, the idea that garbage could be the power source of the future was a humorous sci-fi dream and whilst we've yet to achieve nuclear fusion from banana skins and chicken bones, Refuse Derived Fuels (RDF) are a reality.

Through my work I sometimes have to visit landfill sites and every time, without fail, the scale of these stinking holes fills me with horror. It's not just the size of them that appals me, but also how much of the material that is being buried could be usefully re-used. It will come as a shock to many people to discover that much of the stuff that they put out for recycling, still ends up in a hole in the ground.

In many areas of the country, if you diligently put out your garden waste for collection, or take it to a recycling centre, it goes to a landfill site where it is composted as promised. However, the compost is then used to cap the layers of bin-bags and rotting food to try and create some sort of soil-like structure to the waste beneath. It's a common practice and without it landfill sites would be just pools of festering mess. Much of the wood from recycling sites ends up being shredded and added to the cover too.(see google map below)

If you're even remotely concerned about the practice of putting huge amounts of rubbish into holes in the ground it's a doubly painful experience to see useful material like compost and wood being buried too. And it certainly doesn't have to be like this.

Anaerobic Digestion is just one of the new, proven technologies, that works on small scales in local facilities and generates heat and power from waste. Food and green waste are cooked, the gas collected, and the resulting compost digestate can be used as fertilizer - http://www.biogas-info.co.uk/index.php/what-is-ad-qa. The success of these plants is unquestionable and although there are plenty of hurdles (like what exactly do you do with the compost?) they are small fry compared to the terrible legacy of landfill.

Doc Brown would be further impressed by the next generation of biomass power stations and industrial boilers that run off an ever wider spectrum of waste. At the moment the prime biomass fuel is wood - either residues from the timber industry or clean recycled wood, however, the Germans (of course) are now using materials like MDF, chipboard and even plastics. The trick is in the efficacy of the scrubbers and filters used to clean the emissions and in ensuring that all the CO2 and heat is efficiently harvested for use; not released.

It is possible now to generate huge amounts of power from waste and it is happening now, not in the future (probably close to 1.21GW). Except in Britain where decades of government dithering has meant that we have only a handful of such generators compared with the hundreds in use in Europe.

Consider this too. In the UK councils and businesses have to pay between £50-£90 per tonne to landfill their waste, but in Germany powers stations pay up to £40 per tonne to take it in as fuel.....you do the math as they say.

A landfill site with composting operation FYI

View Landfill site in a larger map