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Encyclopedia of Global Resources part 66 provides a wide variety of perspectives on both traditional and more recent views of Earth's resources. It serves as a bridge connecting the domains of resource exploitation, environmentalism, geology, and biology, and it explains their interrelationships in terms that students and other nonspecialists can understand. The articles in this set are extremely diverse, with articles covering soil, fisheries, forests, aluminum, the Industrial Revolution, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the hydrologic cycle, glass, and placer mineral deposits. . | 598 Incineration of wastes Global Resources A garbage incinerator in Amsterdam the Netherlands belches smoke into the atmosphere. AFP Getty Images incinerators have been used for energy production although not on a large scale. Household Waste and Trash-to-Energy Programs The large volume of household waste is becoming an increasing problem for many localities in the United States. Landfill space is at a premium in some areas and incineration offers a means of reducing the waste stream through the destruction of organic material. Open burning is prohibited by the Clean Air Act as well as by many municipal ordinances. However incineration in grate-type furnaces or kilns can reduce toxic releases to the air and well-designed facilities can capture the ash for landfilling. This approach involves extensive sorting so that primarily organic material will be incinerated. Because waste incineration requires high temperatures a possibility exists for the generation of electrical energy as a by-product of the process. In the late 1970 s and early 1980 s trash-to-energy processes appeared to have a promising future in several U.S. metropolitan areas. Several local governments intended to use incinerators to generate electrical energy either on their own or in tandem with an electric utility. However a number of factors hampered the adoption of this approach. There were significant costs involved in sorting waste and there was public reluctance to accept waste incineration. Landfill fees proved to be cheaper than incineration and low-cost electric power continued to be available from other sources. Charlotte North Carolina for example adopted a trash-to-energy program in the 1980 s but abandoned it in the early 1990 s as energy costs remained low and the costs of operating the incineration facility continued to increase. According to the Environmental Protection Agency by the end of 2008 the United States had nearly five hundred landfill-gas-to-energy sites. Hazardous Waste .
