The costs of not Pyrolyzing

 Pyrolysis is a method for turning a whole range of waste streams into petroleum products such as cooking gas, gasoline, diesel fuel, airline fuel and all the way up to tars.  It is done by heating the material in question in an enclosed retort up to, typically, 5000C.  In a petroleum refinery, this would be called cracking.  If you heat heavy crude (long chain molecules) up to a high temperature it cracks the long chains and produced more of the more valuable short chain molecules.

It seems only right and logical that a pyrolysis unit/business should be credited with the costs it avoids.  In other words, we must take externalities into account.  Some of the worst abuses of people and the natural world occur because we don't take the true cost of our actions into account.

There are costs of not treating your waste streams by pyrolysis.  Some of them are general to all waste streams.  Some applying to specific wastes.  First the general ones.

General Costs of Not Pyrolyzing

Sending waste to land fill

First, a waste dump charges money per ton for waste that they store.  For specific wastes they often charge more.  Secondly, a waste dump typically fills up a formerly beautiful valley with garbage, removing it from public use and thirdly if not managed very carefully, water leaches out of the waste dump and pollutes the water down steam from the dump

Sending waste overseas

Hard to believe that this is actually a thing.  We used to send our waste plastic to China before they became a tad sensitive to being the garbage disposal country.  It hurt their pride.  Now, at least here in New Zealand, we send it to another country.  I won't say which one.  I don't want to hurt their feelings.  They don't dispose of this plastic in an acceptable way (pyrolysis for instance) and it blows into their streams, lakes and rivers and is carried to the ocean.  I don't think I have to detail the damage that plastic does in the ocean.  It has been covered again and again in article after article.

Costs for Specific Waste Streams

Used Tires

Leave a tire outside in any orientation you like.  After the first rain look inside.  No matter which way you oriented the tire, there is now a little pool of water inside.  As we all know, the weather is warming and various organisms are moving poleward.  One such class of organism are the mosquitoes.  A particularly noxious group are the Culex mosquitoes and A aegypti   They transmit a particularly noxious range of diseases.  Aegypti can breed in an upturned bottle cap. A massive  pile of tires is a huge mosquito breeding farm.

Of course then there is a fire danger with some really toxic smoke being produced and a leaching danger with some chemicals being leached by rain into the ground. 

Wood 

Starting at lumber mills, they produce great quantities of off cuts with no value and saw dust.  The saw dust has some value to horticulture and the off cuts can be sold as fire wood.  However, if you pyrolyze this waste, you produce completely green petroleum products and charcoal.  The charcoal can be incorporated into agricultural soils where it serves the same function as humus and last for a very long time, sequestering carbon in the process.  This lowers the financial obligation of a country under the Koyota protocol. 

 

If you build quality buildings from engineered wood, you, of course, sequester even more carbon for significant periods.

Treated wood is another problem all together.  Tannelized wood has been pressure treated with a mix of Chrome Copper and Arsenic salts.  There are many off cuts during the building process and over time, buildings will be demolished and this wood burnt.  The ash is toxic and you don't want it incorporated into your soils or sent to a land fill.  If pyrolyzed, the ash can be sent to a refinery and the metals recovered and kept out of the environment.  Otherwise, over time we are polluting our soils.

Electronic Equipment 

Electronic equipment is mostly plastic these days.  In addition it contains a wide variety of valuable metals.  All can be recovered by pyrolyzing the equipment and sending the ash to a refinery

Plastic  

When plastic is burnt in a normal 'bonfire', it releases dioxides.  The formula is C₆H₃O₂.  It is a liquid at room temperature and is used in transformers to suppress sparking.  Heated in a properly designed pyrolysis unit, dioxides are broken down into harmless compounds.  If left in nature, they accumulate in the fat and concentrate as they go up the food chain.  They are carcinogenic.  Eliminating dioxides from the environment reduced health costs.