In the countryside in the south of Europe you often see small scale farmers and others with small plots of land burn all kinds of garbage. Just like that.
It is difficult for them to properly recycle the tree branches and such. Too labor intensive to do something useful with it. The big chunks of wood are stored for the stove in the winter.
To have it collected by garbage trucks is a waste of gasoline.
Now how to store this energy conveniently? Perhaps sell it, speculate with it even.
Have some super-efficient stove with all the modern filters that you can insert any kind of garbage in and out comes a fluid that can be used for (clean) energy later. Like hydrogen. It could charge an electric car, bike or moped perhaps.
Anything is better than just burning it.-- rrr, Dec 27 2021 Make sure your designs don't have a "Goldberg factor". https://www.theatla...-electricity/63537/ [doctorremulac3, Dec 28 2021] First converting the heat into electricity to create hydrogen is inevitable it seems? Then storage in a battery or just feeding it to the electricity grid makes more sense...-- rrr, Dec 27 2021 First build a methane digester, then wrap it in water lines. Next use a solar powered wood chipper to turn that waste into shavings.
Heap the shavings onto the methane digester and collect the gas.Plumb the water lines through the floors of your buildings for free heat as the pile decomposes. The BTU's given off by a compost heap equal the ammount of heat given off by combustion just over a much longer time.
No hydrogen though.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Dec 27 2021 //some super-efficient stove...
How does that work? Magic?//
Just moving to rocket stove designs gets you much more efficiency, I see numbers as high as 40%, but even 10% is worth it for such a minor tweak. The second benefit is better combustion leading to less soot, air quality can be horrific in areas with lots of wood burning and poor ventilation, take the whole Chamonix valley as an example, if the winds aren't kind, it's like smog.
The idea isn't really an idea. Waste wood should be taken away, burned for biomass energy and the ashes treated/optimized as fertilizer and delivered back as free trade for the wood.-- bs0u0155, Dec 27 2021 If you burn the wood in a retort not only are most of the gasses combusted but you're left with bio-char which, when activated in a compost heap becomes super-fertilizer.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Dec 27 2021 So he's been around the bakery on and off for a few decades and yet doesn't comprehend basic chemical elements.
Maybe if you were to take all of that waste garbage and bombard it with some high-energy neutrons until you break it down into atoms, using utter gobs of energy to do so...
But why create hydrogen when you can just turn lead into gold with the same sort of magic?-- RayfordSteele, Dec 28 2021 I'll go for what '2 fries shy' proposes. Because the situation I am trying to overcome is what bs0u0155 describes in the Chamonix valley. It can be like smog.
It would be nicer if the production of methane can be prevented. I picked up in the popular press that hydrogen is clean.
My apologies for my lack of knowledge in chemistry, it is not my field. Busy with other things during my absence from the Halfbakery. Shall I delete this entry then?-- rrr, Dec 28 2021 //My apologies for my lack of knowledge in chemistry, it is not my field. Busy with other things during my absence from the Halfbakery. Shall I delete this entry then?//
Absolutely not, this is a chat site, not a government regulated technology development collective, we're not NASA. It can be a good place to learn too if you connect with the right people. It's also entirely okay to be wrong during that process of learning. Knowledge is gift to be shared, not a cudgel to beat less informed people over the head with.
That being said, there's this guy named Rube Goldberg that made cartoons of outlandish contraptions that did a simple job with as many steps as possible, so while this might work, it's got a bit of what I'll call the Goldberg factor. You could make a stove that burns garbage and uses the heat to generate electricity that you then use to make hydrogen, but it wouldn't be very efficient.
But keep thinking about stuff like that and asking questions, that's how you learn.-- doctorremulac3, Dec 28 2021 //If you burn the wood in a retort not only are most of the gasses combusted but you're left with bio-char which,//
If you burn it cleverly, you can use the heat to then distill the wood and get useful stuff! Turpentine! Creosote!-- bs0u0155, Dec 28 2021 Kewl!-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Dec 29 2021 You know this does bring up an interesting concept: "Where's the line that this would have to cross to be efficient enough to make this worth while?"
You'd need a mechanism to scrub this so it wouldn't pollute and it would have to work better than trucks that burn fuel to cart garbage to the landfill. There's a number you'd have to determine you'd shoot for. With some sort of mechanism burning garbage and providing, say, additional heat for a water heating system where the heat is stored in an insulated water tank, scrubbers or something removing the smoke, then you take the resulting ashes and cart them someplace with a truck that comes maybe every 6 months opposed to every week. You'd have to save money, energy and get the cost amortized over some period of time. If it cost $5,000 to build this and it saved you having to take the garbage out ever again, got a little reduction in your water heating bill (it wouldn't be much) and reduced landfill cubic footage by 95% and cut garbage truck fuel trips and fuel consumption by 90%? That's something.
I wouldn't bother with electricity, not enough of a prize for the effort, but if you change the goal to just saving truck trips to the dump, you might have a challenge worth looking into.
And here's the best part, while trying to solve this problem you might accidentally come up with a solution to a problem you weren't even looking for. Happens all the time.-- doctorremulac3, Dec 29 2021 random, halfbakery