To burn food waste to make electricity is to burn soil in the making and to remove the amount of soil and fertility. Burning food waste for energy perpetuates the wasting of food, and removes incentives to stop it.
• Soil is made from vegetation, rocks and . . . food - these all decay to become soil
Do we really think burning food waste to turn on the lights works in the long run?
Trashing trees and vegetation brought down the Easter Island and many other cultures which destroyed their soils.
In a May 2020 article by Professor Ian Lowe published in The Conversation, he says:
“ . . . destroying forests for biomass energy does more harm than good – due to loss of habitat, damage to water systems, and the time taken for some forests to recover from the removal of wood.
Most advocates of cleaner energy systems recognise the limitations of biomass as an energy source.”
(Professor Ian Lowe - Ian Lowe Emeritus Professor, School of Science, Griffith University.)
The link given in the article refers to an article which includes the following:
“6. Sustainability criteria
Commercial biomass can be used to provide heat and electricity as well as liquid biofuels and biogas for transport. However, without structural changes to the energy system, the production of biomass energy crops and removal of biomass residues from forest and agricultural systems for energy production can result in negative environmental, economic, or social impact. Moreover, unsustainable biomass production would erode the climate related environmental advantage of bioenergy. In addition, there are risks related to such factors as supply, fuel quality, and price increases, as well as issues such as competition for land area and the degree of renewability of given assets.
Sustainability decreases such risks, and can be supported by certification of substrates’ origin (Skambracks, 2007).
Taken as a whole, it’s more important than ever to reliably demonstrate that the advantages of biofuels made from biomass exceed the cost of potential environmental damage caused by their production. Therefore, sustainable production of biomass for use as fuels is the major issue in order to increase bioenergy production.”
Criticism of Global Ecological Biomass for Liveliness
International Journal of Electronics, Electrical and Computational System IJEECS ISSN 2348-117X Volume 3, Issue 4 June 2014
Example of burning food waste to make electricity - Earthpower, Sydney, NSW
• Food waste burnt to make electricity: Stage 1 Food waste trucked to site . . . Stage 4 Food waste turned into biogas . . . Stage 5 Biogas burnt to make electricity for the main electricity grid Note the greenwash of “Green Power”.
The extract from Earthpower’s website shows food waste is prepared for burning and burnt at steps 4 and 5.
It also shows the system depends on and perpetuates the treatment of food as a ‘waste’ product.
Thus the process depends for its success on obliging citizens to pay to have their ‘waste’ taken away, and then again to pay to buy the energy. And the process works so that Earth loses the amount of soil that food would otherwise become in the cycle of life.
Taking the Earthpower technology to its logical conclusion, and if it were the solution, then at some stage the amount of soil would eventually be zero, or, at least the soil that formerly grew food would disappear.
• New Hampshire in the US turns food waste into compost and prevents it becoming part of the waste stream. This example is given in the NSW government’s issues paper for ending waste
The truly green or sustainable solution, as I see it, is to return food waste to soil; to keep food waste in various ways turned into soil at the home, business, country and city.
The example of New Hampshire in the US shows one option that demonstrates this is feasible, and the data from that state’s approach seems compelling to me.
Bioenergy burns trees, vegetation and food waste to make electricity. To burn food waste is to throw away both money and soil - forever.
Why pay twice; once to have food waste taken away, then second to buy electricity made from burning it?
Instead, pay not at all - let’s compost our food waste to grow our soil and our food.
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