Showing posts with label waste treatment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label waste treatment. Show all posts

Monday, October 15, 2007

The FeeBate policy: a combination of a fee that funds a rebate

Below, I posted articles on areas ranging from urban planning, agriculture, waste treatment and transport to energy. These articles form part of a wider vision, a package of policies recommended for global adoption, all aiming to curb emissions of greenhouse gases; in each case, a FeeBate is proposed, which constitutes the most effective way to deal with global warming. Furthermore, the FeeBate policy is ideology- and budget-neutral and has the least risk of feeding a wasteful bureaucracy. 

In essence, the idea of the FeeBate policy is that a fee is imposed on products that cause emissions of greenhouse gases, while the proceeds of these fees in each case are used to help better alternatives. Items that should attract fees include fossil fuel, fertilizers, meat and polluting concrete. The proceeds of fees on these items should pay for rebates on clean alternatives in energy, such as solar and wind power, respectively supply of agrichar, alternative food (my personal favorite is vegan-organic food served in restaurants in communities without roads) and clean concrete. 

This approach constitutes the most effective way to reduce the three major greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane and mitrous oxide. In many respects, markets are best suited to work out which products and technologies should get support - the main criteria should be that they are replacements for items that attracted fees, that they are safe and that they cause little or no emissions of greenhouse gases, or - even better - that they are greenhouse gas negative. Fees can be collected locally as long as each community is serious about reducing greenhouse gases; importantly, the proceeds should fund rebates on local supply of better alternatives. As an example, rebates on supply of clean and renewable energy can be funded by fees on coal that is burned to supply electricity in the area. Similarly, agrichar can be produced by means of pyrolysis from various forms of biowaste - rebates on sales of agrichar can be funded by fees on fertilizers. 

The concept should be adopted globally, but implemented locally; levels of fees and rebates can be adjusted on an annual basis, depending on how successfully the shift takes place. This FeeBate policy can be regarded as a form of geo-engineering; it will change the shape of urban planning, agriculture, waste treatment, transport and energy supply around the world; moreover, it will transform politics and the very socio-economic fabric of society on a global scale. 

In conclusion, the FeeBate policy that I proposed includes:
  • a fee of 10% on sales of new cars with internal combustion engines, with proceeds used to fund rebates for electric cars
  • a fee of 10% on sales of gasoline, with proceeds used to fund rebates on purchases and installation of facilities that produce renewable energy
  • a fee of 10% on sales of coal, with rebates given when electricity suppliers install facilities that produce electricity from renewable sources
  • a fee of 10% on building and construction work using concrete that contributes to global warming, with proceeds used to fund rebates on buildings that used clean concrete
  • a fee of 10% on sales of fertilizers, with rebates on sales of agrichar
  • a fee of 10% on sales of meat, with rebates and vouchers for vegan-organic foo

Agrichar

Bio-char pellets, EpridaMost households only use one or at most two different rubbish bins, one for recyclables (paper & packaging) and one for general waste. It makes a lot of sense to add a third type of rubbish bin, for biowaste, i.e. kitchen waste, soil and garden waste.

Many people already compost such biowaste in the garden, but all too often such biowaste disappears along with the general waste in the rubbish bin. As displayed on the picture below, analysis in Waikato, New Zealand, shows that about half of household waste can consist of kitchen waste, soil and garden waste. Such waste ends up on rubbish tips, where the decomposing process leads to greenhouse gases, such as methane. And all too often, farmers burn crop residues on the land, resulting in huge emissions of greenhouse gases.

What we throw away, Waikato, New ZealandAll such biowaste could deliver affordable energy by using the slow burning process of pyrolysis to produce agrichar or bio-char, a form of charcoal that is totally black. Organic material, when burnt with air, will normally turn into white ash, while the carbon contained in the biowaste goes up into the air as carbon dioxide (CO2). In case of pyrolysis, by contrast, biowaste is heated up while starved of oxygen, resulting in this black form of charcoal.

This agrichar was at first glance regarded as a useless byproduct when producing hydrogen from biowaste, but it is increasingly recognized for its qualities as a soil supplement. Agrichar makes the soil better retain water and nutrients for plants, thus reducing losses of nutrients and reducing the CO2 that goes out of the soil, while enhancing soil productivity and making it store more carbon.

When biowaste is normally added to soil, the carbon contained in crop residue, mulch and compost is likely to stay there for only two or three years. By contrast, the more stable carbon in agrichar can stay in the soil for hundreds of years. Adding agrichar just once could be equivalent to composting the same weight every year for decades.

Agrichar appears to be the best way to bury carbon in topsoil, resulting in soil restoration and improved agriculture. Agrichar has the potential to remove substantial amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, as it both buries carbon in the soil and gets more CO2 out of the atmosphere through better growth of vegetation. Agrichar restores soils and increases fertility. It results in plants taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere, which ends up in the soil and in the vegetation. Agrichar feeds new life in the soil and increases respiration, leading to improvements in soil structure, specifically its capacity to retain water and nutrients. Agrichar makes the soil structure more porous, with lots of surface area for water and nutrients to hold onto, so that both water and nutrients are better retained in the soil.

In conclusion, recycling biowaste in the above way is an excellent method to produce hydrogen (e.g. for cars) and to bury carbon in the soil and improve production of food. Agrichar is now produced for soil enrichment at a growing number of places. The top photo shows agrichar in pellet form from Eprida. Australian-based BEST Energies has built a demonstration pyrolysis plant with a capacity to process 300 kilograms of biowaste per hour. It accepts biowaste such as dry green waste, wood waste, rice hulls, cow and poultry manure or paper mill waste. The plant cooks the biomass without oxygen, producing syngas, a flammable mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The agrichar thus produced retains about half the carbon of the original biowaste (the other half was burned in the process of producing the syngas).

Also important is to compare different farming practices. Carbon is important for holding the soil together. Farmers now typically plough the soil to plant the seeds and add fertilizers. This ploughing causes oxygen to mix with the carbon in the soil, resulting in oxidation, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere. Ploughing leads to a looser soil structure, prone to erosion under the destructive impact of heavy rains, flooding, thunderstorms, wind and animal traffic. Given the more extreme weather that can be expected due to global warming, we should reconsider practices such as ploughing.

Furthermore, the huge monocultures of modern farming have become dependent on fertilizers and pesticides. The separation of farming and urban areas has in part become necessary due to the practice of spraying chemicals and pesticides. Instead, we should consider growing more food on smaller-scale farms, in gardens and greenhouses within areas currently designated for urban usage. Vegan-organic farming can increase bio-diversity; by carefully selecting complementary vegetation to grow close together, diseases and pests can be minimized while the nutritional value, taste and other qualities of the food can be increased.

An issue of growing concern is nitrous oxide (N2O), which is 310 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas when released in the atmosphere. Much release of N2O is related to the practices of ploughing and adding fertilizers to the soil. Microbes subsequently convert the nitrogen in these fertilisers into N2O. A recent study led by Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen indicates that the current ways of growing and burning biofuel actually raise rather than lower greenhouse gas emissions. The study concludes that growing some of the most commonly used biofuel crops (rapeseed biodiesel and corn bioethanol) releases twice the amount of N2O, compared to what the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates for farming. The findings follow a recent OECD report that concluded that growing biofuel crops threatens to cause food shortages and damage biodiversity, with only limted benefits in terms of global warming.

All this is no trivial matter. Soils contain more carbon than all vegetation and the atmosphere combined. Therefore, soil is the obvious place to look at when trying to solve problems associated with global warming. By changing agricultural practices, we can add carbon to the soil and can minimize release of greenhouse gases.

References:

- Soils offer new hope as carbon sink
http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/research/updates/issues/may-2007/soils-offer-new-hope/

- Surprise: less oxygen could be just the trick
http://tinyurl.com/ywalt4

- What we throw away
http://www.waikato.govt.nz/enviroinfo/waste/whatwethrowaway.htm

- The Carbon Farmers
http://www.abc.net.au/science/features/soilcarbon/

- Living Soil
http://www.championtrees.org/topsoil/

- BEST Pyrolysis, Inc.
http://www.bestenergies.com/companies/bestpyrolysis.html

- Eprida, Inc.
http://eprida.com/hydro/

- Biofuels could boost global warming, finds studyhttp://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/September/21090701.asp

- Biofuels: is the cure worse than the disease?
http://tinyurl.com/yq9t8o

Companies producing agrichar:
- terra preta at bioenergylists.org
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/company