A Global Snapshot of Solid Waste

Our numbers shows 465 kg/capita, regarding Eurostat 483 kg/person

24.10.2022 14:51:29

The use of fire to heat and feed humans goes back a million years. At about 2300 BC, controlled fire brought about the Bronze Age and, a thousand years later, the Iron Age. The 18th century Industrial Revolution was made possible by the steam engine and to this date much of the electricity and all the cement and metals used by humanity are produced by controlled combustion. In the last seventy years, technologies for controlled combustion of wastes in specially designed power plants (WTE) have advanced greatly.
In a forthcoming Special Issue of the journal "Waste Disposal and Renewable Energy (in press), I have reviewed the evolution of the WTE technology in the 21st century, with special focus on the world’s two largest economies: U.S.A. and China. Everyone knows about recycling and its merits. Yet, most people are not aware that combustion with energy recovery is now used globally at nearly the same scale (about 320 million tons of MSW) as recycling (about 350 million tons of MSW). However, the tonnage of post-recycling MSW landfilled globally is nearly four times that used as fuel in WTE power plants.. So, there is a lot of room for improvement, both in recycling and WTE.

01.10.2022 09:45:13