On a recent visit to Switzerland, I was able to visit the new plant in 
Lausanne to extract value from, mainly, household garbage, rather than 
simply landfill it. This plant generates electricity and heat (for a 
hospital and apartment blocks) from the waste and virtually eliminates 
any pollution from the waste. Furthermore it eliminates the need to use 
imported fossil fuels to generate the recovered energy. The whole plant 
is economically profitable, even in the first year of service. I have 
placed a report of my visit on the Web at 
http://www.cypenv.org/Files/tridel.htm and this gives a brief run-down 
of how it operates.

This has inspired me to wonder whether the same technology could be 
applied in this country and I did a mini-study to assess roughly the 
possibility of its viability and I came to the conclusion that it could 
well be a net advance in improving the environment and helping to reduce 
a potential shortfall in the supply of electricity and, possibly, water. 
The results of this study are at 
http://www.cypenv.org/Files/cypwastenhanc.htm and this concludes with 
four very positive points, with additional advantages of recycling some 
waste which is not otherwise economically viable to treat, as well as 
exploiting the value of rubbish.

Knowing that Toronto spends a fortune to export their garbage to 
Michigan and is environmentally unsound, I'm certain that the same 
technology could be applied there to be both environmentally and 
economically better. The same may apply to thousands of other places 
around the world.

One of the thorny questions is recycling electronics. There is no 
difficulty in extracting the metals from EOL PCBs but the difficulty has 
always been what to do with the metal-stripped boards. Extracting the 
energy from them is certainly one way of recycling them.

Brian