One man’s trash: Sweden solution

Home In All Lands: Common cents: follow Canada and abolish worthless penny

As you may have read in my previous columns, I dislike the poor state of the railways in this country and I dislike the endless mischaracterizations of Europe by politicians on this side of the Atlantic. I think the laws on alcohol over here are out-dated and that the USPS shouldn’t be left to die.
The emotion I may reserve for those topics—while great—is nothing compared to my unbridled hatred for something that many of you might not even consider deserving of attention: the penny.
Now, I should make it clear that there isn’t anything intrinsic to pennies as objects that make them worthy of anyone’s ire—after all, they are little more than discs made out of an alloy that is a trifling 2.5 percent copper (the rest is zinc). But the relatively low price of zinc cannot compensate for the fact that it costs 2.4 cents to make a single penny.

Home In All Lands: In defense of small theater: save the Eveningstar Cinema

My columns tend to require the reader to dig through layers of fluff, verbosity and nonsense (such as this) to get to the core idea. This week’s column, however, is no rant. It is a plea for help. Not for me but for a downtown institution fighting for survival. I want to tell you about its history, why it has to be saved, and how you can help its campaign to stay in business.
The Eveningstar Cinema, located at the back of the Tontine Mall on Maine Street, has been at the heart of Brunswick since it opened on Friday, November 2, 1979. The first film it screened was “Heaven Can Wait,” a comedy about a football player who dies and then is sent back down from heaven to live in the body of a millionaire. The theater been a part of Brunswick life for more than three decades and its name refers to the earliest years of this town’s existence.
When fisherman settled what they called Pejepscot in the 17th century, they received considerable assistance from the Native Americans who inhabited this area, such that the names of the local chief and his wife can be found in early town records. The wife’s name—according to a history of the theatre written by Greg Melick, its builder and designer—translates to mean “Eveningstar.” The cinema is much more than a recent arrival in this town; indeed, its name speaks to Brunswick’s long history.

Home In All Lands

One man’s trash: Sweden solution

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Jean-Paul Honegger

Columnist

April 24, 2013

Sweden is not producing enough trash, and that’s a problem.

To the environmentally-minded members of the Bowdoin community, that statement may well have struck you as odd. Surely, in a world that we know to have finite resources, reduced waste production should be a good thing—not so in Sweden.

Whereas in many countries, household trash is unceremoniously dumped into landfills, the Swedes have become the world’s foremost experts on efficient—and environmentally friendly—incineration.

It began in the late 1940s, when rubbish was first incinerated as a means to provide heat to homes. Nearly seven decades later, the program has been considerably expanded and made even safer for the environment.

Currently, over 96 percent of Sweden’s rubbish is hauled off for incineration at several plants around the country. This energy is then used to produce heat for over 810,000 homes and electricity for a quarter of a million households. The problem I mentioned earlier doesn’t have anything to do with the impact that these incineration plants may have on the environment. In fact, emissions are carefully and systematically “scrubbed” to remove dust particles as well as dangerous chemicals like lead, cadmium and mercury. Though it is nearly impossible to remove all pollutants from the smokestacks, the cleansing process is so efficient that emissions released into the atmosphere only contribute minimally to overall air pollution when compared to an oil or coal-fired plant.

In documentation that promotes this Swedish model of energy production, Afvall Sverige, the national waste management agency, notes: “Waste incineration generates as much energy as 1.1 million cubic meters of oil, which reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 2.2 million metric tons per year.”

Sweden’s predicament is decidedly a logistical (rather than environmental) problem—namely that there isn’t enough household waste to keep the plants running at optimal capacity. Although the average Swede produces 500kg of trash per year, this output isn’t enough to keep the incineration facilities satisfied.

The machines are so efficient and the shortage of garbage so acute that Sweden recently started to import rubbish from Norway, even though the surplus from its neighbour cannot satiate the incineration plants. This has forced the government to draw up plans that anticipate importing 800,000 tons of trash every year from countries as distant as Romania, Bulgaria and Italy to keep their energy-producing incineration programs alive.

This inconvenience aside, it’s clear that Sweden has found a model that largely works. Unsurprisingly, other countries, including Denmark, Austria, Japan and Germany, have adopted the so-called “Swedish model” of waste-to-energy incineration.

For all its potential benefits, this system has not been widely adopted in the United States. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) there are only 87 incineration plants in the entire country. Most states still resort to “the dump” as the preferred means of waste disposal, which is incredibly damaging to water resources and the atmosphere.

Landfills are the third largest emitters of methane—a greenhouse gas—in the United States alone, making up a sizeable 16 percent of all methane emissions. Equally alarming is the seepage of dangerous chemicals from these sites, which pollutes groundwater, reservoirs, rivers and lakes—the source of drinking water for millions of Americans.

This risk to public health does not seem to be enough to influence the parochial outlook of many opponents to waste-to-energy incineration, who seem to be more concerned with how the installation of such a plant will make the neighborhood look.

Apparently, vast expanses of decomposing rubbish are so attractive that replacing them simply will not do.

I do not mean to suggest that waste-to-energy incineration plants are the absolute solution to the problems posed by landfills.

There is no use denying that facilities like those in Sweden are expensive. Their construction also obliges people to change their lifestyle to accommodate the increase in recycling that is required when you incinerate, rather than dump, waste.

No solution is without its flaws, but that does not mean that we should completely exclude one of the best options available. The question of our environment’s health is all too often portrayed in terms of the dichotomy of sacrificing or preserving the conveniences of modern life.

As the “Swedish model” shows, this does not need to be the case.

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