Residents were protesting waste incinerators without proper emission filters.

Early this week, protests erupted in China over plans to build a waste incinerator in an eastern city where officials didn’t seek public approval before proceeding. The demonstrations have been running for more than two weeks and turned violent on Saturday, with hundreds of police descending on to the streets of Yuhang, close to the eastern tourist city of Hangzhou. Previous to this week, officials repeated in state media that they would seek public support for the incinerator, but recently have made dozens of arrests in Hangzhou, with at least 10 demonstrators and 29 policemen injured.

Waste incinerators without proper emission filters can release the carcinogen dioxin, said Wu Yixiu, head of environmental group Greenpeace’s toxics campaign in East Asia. Several neighbors of the Hangzhou site cited that risk and noted that incinerators in Germany were required to filter out the toxin. Following large protests in March against a proposed paraxylene plant in the city of Maoming, officials said they would not proceed with facilities if public resistance remained high.

China’s fast growing cities produce around 160 million tons of domestic waste each year, according to domestic reports, and the country is planning around 300 such incinerators within the next three years as part of a “Great Leap Forward in garbage incineration”. For years, China witnesses tens of thousands of so-called “mass incidents” which have recently been linked to several environmental issues. In March, Li Keqiang, the prime minister, vowed to “declare war” on pollution and said his country would turn its back on “inefficient and blind development.”

Climate Change

We live in a world where people love to have their cake and eat it, too. We want a clean house without having to clean. We want to be, but we don’t want to do. We want to stop global warming and climate change, but we don’t want to change our daily habits. We want to avoid things like climate-change induced natural disasters, but we aren’t willing to put in the work to prevent it.

There is hope, yes, but time is running short. We’re at the point where convincing people to live greener and be nicer to the environment has to come with a dire warning of impending doom. It sounds a bit melodramatic, yes, but it’s true.
And now scientists have one more thing you can add to your dire warning speech: the fact that the occurrence of “super” El Niños is likely to double as our planet continues to warm. El Niño refers to an unusually warm water pattern that stretches across the eastern equatorial Pacific every 3-7 years. And every once in a while, we see a bigger one, such as the super El Niño of 1997-1998 and one in 1982-1983. With these super El Niños often comes a slough of other weather-related debauchery like heavy rains, landslides, wildfires, and more. In 1997-98, there were an estimated 23,000 deaths worldwide and $35-$40 billion in damage attributed to El Niño.

Whereas now the likelihood of a super El Niño is one every twenty years or so, as the planet warms that number will change to one every ten years. El Niños will still occur on about the same schedule, but more of them will be abnormally strong.

The study that predicted these changes was conducted by Wenjun Cai and a team of researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia. The findings were published in Nature Climate Change.

incinerators

Are we the only ones “out there”? This question and many like it have been asked for years, with no concrete answers available. But as scientists delve further into deep space and discover distant galaxies, the most likely answer seems to be coming more and more into focus: no.

Because, really, how can we be the only intelligent beings in such a vast universe? In recent years, scientists have discovered that “super-Earths,” or other, slightly larger, earth-like terrestrial planets, are far more common than originally thought.

“Super-Earths are expected to have deep oceans that will overflow their basins and inundate the entire surface, but we show this logic to be flawed,” said Nicholas Cowan, a researcher involved in a new study, Water Cycling Between Ocean and Mantle: Super-Earths Need Not Be Waterworlds. “Terrestrial planets have significant amounts of water in their interior. Super-Earths are likely to have shallow oceans to go along with their shallow ocean basins.”

Conventional wisdom has dictated that super-Earths would likely be waterworlds, with their surfaces completely covered in water. But Abbott and Cowan challenge this logic, presenting a new model that shows there could, in fact, be more earthlike planets out there than previously believed.

The study, co-written by Cowan and Doran Abbott, will be published on January 20th in the Astrophysical Journal. According to Abbott’s and Cowan’s model, these planets could store significant amounts of water in their mantles, allowing them to go from being “waterworlds” to having a combination of continents and oceans. This combination of characteristics would likely create a much more stable planet environment, not dissimilar to Earth’s.

Using this “water storage” method, Cowan says, “We can put 80 times more water on a super-Earth and still have its surface look like earth.” He continues, “These massive planets have enormous seafloor pressure, and this force pushes water into the mantle.”

http://quietkinetic.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/super-earths-far-more-common-than-originally-thought-researchers-say/

the streets of the Royal Trails neighborhood were lined with new large tan bins, two per household. Two trailers loaded with dozens of bulky containers drove off as four workers delivered the new recycling and trash carts last week to Lake residents..

lRelated Read Lauren Ritchie’s columnsNewsRead Lauren Ritchie’s columnsSee all relatedí

The process has been a longtime coming. After dumping a controversial contract that used a garbage incinerator, county officials decided to change to a “1-1-1” collection system. The new 7-year contract offers residents in unincorporated Lake an option of three different-sized trash and recycling carts — 95, 65 and 35 gallons — at no additional cost.

Homeowners will receive a 95-gallon cart for trash and a 65-gallon cart for recyclables. The once-a-week trash, once-a-week recycling and once-a-week yard-waste pickup collection begins Oct. 6.

Skip McCall, Lake’s solid waste division manager, said the transition process has been smooth sailing so far, although some residents were concerned about the cart sizes.

incinerator

“You can mix the sizes of your carts,” he said. “We try to make it as user-friendly as possible.”

He said he encourages residents to test the new carts for a few weeks before opting to change the sizes.

“Trash is a very sensitive topic to talk about,” he said. “We try to give the residents options so we’re not telling them, ‘this is what you have to have.'”

The new garbage and recycling carts will be collected with trucks equipped with an automated arm, which will save money by cutting the number of workers needed per truck from three to one, McCall said. He said officials hope to increase the county’s recycling rate from 8 percent to about 25 percent during the first year.

“Our recycling percentage is very low within this county. A lot of that is attributed to everything in the past, having to go to the incinerator,” McCall said. “The more we’re able to recycle, that means our disposal cost at the landfill is going to be less.”

Last year, county commissioners voted in favor of hauling trash to a Sumter landfill operated by ACMS Inc. over continuing with the Okahumpka incinerator, which was used since 1988 and required the county to supply 163,000 tons of garbage a year. Commissioner Leslie Campione argued against the change, saying the county could have saved money with other options, including sticking with incinerator owner Covanta Energy, which proposed a $25 million recycling facility.

Officials started issuing the new trash and recycling carts in August to the 67,040 residential units affected and held 24 community meetings to inform residents of the changes. Residents may switch trash and recycling cart sizes at no charge through April 1. Extra garbage carts are available for $60 and the additional disposal cost will be charged to homeowners’ tax bills.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/lake/os-lk-new-garbage-carts-lake-county-20140927-story.html

The primary factors considered in the design and construction of a modified De-Montfort type intermittent incinerator for combusting medical wastes were the waste types, fuel, chimney size, and flue gas residence time. The design analysis was based on flue gas flow rate of 0.13 m3/s, maximum primary chamber temperature of 870 °C and minimum ambient temperature of 27 °C. The total flue gas residence time of 6.9 s was achieved for the three chamber system of 0.9 m3 total volume. The medical wastes generated from the four medical facilities in Ga East District (Ghana) consisted of infectious sharp objects, syringes, wound dressings and gloves; which were incinerated at a throughput of 80 kg/day with destruction efficiency of 98.47 %, using fuelwood as primary fuel. The natural convection thermo-fluid flow was controlled by ambient wind speed of ~ 3.8 ms-1, at temperature of 31.5 °C. The primary combustion chamber temperature attained was ~ 516 °C, while the third chamber temperature reached 760 °C, which ensured complete combustion of the wastes with reduced particulate matter emissions. At optimum operating capacity of 0.6 m3, up to 4 cycles of incineration were done in a day, each cycle lasting about 80 minutes.