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PUBLISHER'S LETTER
Saving greenhouse gases
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
Leo Simpson, B.Bus., FAICD
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2 Silicon Chip
While it passed with little media comment,
Senator Robert Hill recently signed the Kyoto
accord which commits Australia to reducing
greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2015.
Senator Hill has stated that it will be difficult
for Australia to meet these targets and no
doubt he is right, given much of the negative
or downright non-thinking which appears to
come from Government and industry circles.
Well, I have little doubt that we can reduce
our greenhouse gases to meet or exceed the
targets but we will have to be far more innovative than we have been up until now. I would go further and state that
we can save a lot of money in the process. As I have indicated in the past,
Australia is very wasteful in its use of energy and raw materials and merely
reducing just some of this waste will reap big dividends.
One big problem that faces Australia right now is the huge amount of
waste paper and plastic produced by each and everyone of us. While local
councils do their best to encourage recycling it seems that the problem will
get a whole lot worse before it gets better, if it ever does. Let’s face it, we
will continue to waste paper and plastic and there’s little that can be done
about it. Greenies may wring their hands but that’s the way that modern
economies operate.
The problem with waste paper and plastic is that it is generally more
expensive to recycle it into new product than to dump it in landfills. Hence
there are huge amounts of waste paper that can’t be used now and probably
never will be in the future and the same goes for most of the plastic bottles
which are now being collected for recycling. It will eventually all rot down
and contribute to greenhouse gases.
As I see it, the only practical solution is to burn it all and use the energy
released to generate electricity. There must be literally millions of tons of
waste paper and plastic going into landfills every year. Doesn’t it make sense
to burn this rather than going to the trouble of extracting valuable coal to
generate electricity? After all, our coal reserves will eventually run out.
Of course, there would need to be a lot of investment in pollution control
devices to stop noxious gases being released into the atmosphere but we
should being doing this now rather than building any more conventional
coal-fired power stations.
Every city and sizable town should have its own high temperature furnace
and generators to dispose of waste. It does not make sense to truck it long
distances to power stations way out in the middle of nowhere. The sooner
the greenies and the population in general come to that realisation and see
to it that waste-fired power stations are the way to go, the better.
Leo Simpson
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