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Every year this mass of garbage is turned into 800,000 tones of steam which is sold to a nearby paper recycling facility to replace the use of natural gas. The revenue from the steam offsets some of the incinerator's operating costs.
The plant has three identical mass burn processing lines; each incinerates 10 tones of waste per hour and produces three tones of steam for every ton. About 17 per cent of the Lower Mainland's garbage, mainly from the North Shore, Burnaby and New Westminster is burned at this location.
First Garbage is picked up from curbside and municipal transfer stations then hauled to the plant. The trucks are weighed on a computerized scale then dump their load into the refuse bunker which can hold up to 3,000 tones of garbage. The waste in the refuse bunker is completely contained within the plant the air that is needed for the incinerator combustion is drawn from here, so no odors can escape. Two over head cranes mix the garbage and lift it into the feed chute.
Garbage moves down the feed chute and burns at more then 1000 Celsius. Residue that doesn't burn is called bottom ash. Bottom ash is separated using magnets to get rid of the ferrous metals from it, which is used to make reinforcement bars. The rest of the bottom ash is used as aggregate (crushing rock) material in building roads. It is also used as a daily cover on landfill sites.
Heat and gases from the burning process is passed into a boiler room where they heat tubes of water and create steam which in turn can generate electricity and which cools the gases. In one case at the Burnaby Incinerator the steam is sold to a nearby paper mill that produces cardboard from recycled paper products.
After the gases pass the boiler room they are sent to the air pollution control system. This is where the gases are treated to remove acids, metals and dust. Fly ash comes from small particles of burned waste that became airborne and is captured by the pollution control system.
This essay argues that mandatory recycling should be implemented, with comparison to the voluntary scheme and other waste management methods. At the end of essay, some improvement measures will be introduced. ... (Wakefield, 2000) Apart from landfilling, incinerators pose some environmental and health risks, too. ...
