A City That Turns Garbage Into Energy Copes With a Shortage
By JOHN TAGLIABUE

OSLO — This is a city that imports garbage. Some comes from England, some from Ireland. Some is from neighboring Sweden. It even has designs on the American market.

“I’d like to take some from the United States,” said Pal Mikkelsen, in his office at a huge plant on the edge of town that turns garbage into heat and electricity. “Sea transport is cheap.”

Oslo, a recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn.

The problem is not unique to Oslo, a city of 1.4 million people. Across Northern Europe, where the practice of burning garbage to generate heat and electricity has exploded in recent decades, demand for trash far outstrips supply. “Northern Europe has a huge generating capacity,” said Mr. Mikkelsen, 50, a mechanical engineer who for the last year has been the managing director of Oslo’s waste-to-energy agency.

Yet the fastidious population of Northern Europe produces only about 150 million tons of waste a year, he said, far too little to supply incinerating plants that can handle more than 700 million tons. “And the Swedes continue to build” more plants, he said, a look of exasperation on his face, “as do Austria and Germany.”

Stockholm, to the east, has become such a competitor that it has even managed to persuade some Norwegian municipalities to deliver their waste there. By ship and by truck, countless tons of garbage make their way from regions that have an excess to others that have the capacity to burn it and produce energy.

“There’s a European waste market — it’s a commodity,” said Hege Rooth Olbergsveen, the senior adviser to Oslo’s waste recovery program. “It’s a growing market.”

Most people approve of the idea. “Yes, absolutely,” said Terje Worren, 36, a software consultant, who admitted to heating his house with oil and his water with electricity. “It utilizes waste in a good away.”

The English like it, too, though they are not big players in the garbage-for-energy industry. The Yorkshire-based company that handles garbage collection for cities like Leeds, in the north of England, now ships as much as 1,000 tons a month of garbage — or, since the bad stuff has been sorted out, “refuse-derived fuel” — to countries in Northern Europe, including Norway, according to Donna Cox, a Leeds city spokeswoman.

A British tax on landfill makes it cheaper to send it to places like Oslo. “It helps us in reducing the escalating costs of the landfill tax,” Ms. Cox wrote in an e-mail.

For some, it might seem bizarre that Oslo would resort to importing garbage to produce energy. Norway ranks among the world’s 10 largest exporters of oil and gas, and has abundant coal reserves and a network of more than 1,100 hydroelectric plants in its water-rich mountains. Yet Mr. Mikkelsen said garbage burning was “a game of renewable energy, to reduce the use of fossil fuels.”

Of course, other areas of Europe are producing abundant amounts of garbage, including southern Italy, where cities like Naples paid towns in Germany and the Netherlands to accept garbage, helping to defuse a Neapolitan garbage crisis. Yet though Oslo considered the Italian garbage, it preferred to stick with what it said was the cleaner and safer English waste. “It’s a sensitive question,” Mr. Mikkelsen said.

Garbage may be, well, garbage in some parts of the world, but in Oslo it is very high-tech. Households separate their garbage, putting food waste in green plastic bags, plastics in blue bags and glass elsewhere. The bags are handed out free at groceries and other stores.

The larger of Mr. Mikkelsen’s two waste-to-energy plants uses computerized sensors to separate the color-coded garbage bags that race across conveyor belts and into incinerators. The building’s curved exterior, with lighting that is visible from a long distance to motorists driving by, competes architecturally with Oslo’s striking new opera house.

Still, not everybody is comfortable with this garbage addiction. “From an environmental point of view, it’s a huge problem,” said Lars Haltbrekken, the chairman of Norway’s oldest environmental group, an affiliate of the Friends of the Earth. “There is pressure to produce more and more waste, as long as there is this overcapacity.”

In a hierarchy of environmental goals, Mr. Haltbrekken said, producing less garbage should take first place, while generating energy from garbage should be at the bottom. “The problem is that our lowest priority conflicts with our highest one,” he said.

“So now we import waste from Leeds and other places, and we also had discussions with Naples,” he added. “We said, ‘O.K., so we’re helping the Neapolitans,’ but that’s not a long-term strategy.”

Maybe not, city planners say, but for now it is a necessity. “Recycling and energy recovery have to go hand in hand,” said Ms. Rooth Olbergsveen, of the city’s waste recovery agency. Recycling has made strides, she said, and the separation of organic garbage, like food waste, has begun enabling Oslo to produce biogas, which is now powering some buses in downtown Oslo.

Mr. Haltbrekken acknowledged that he does not benefit from garbage-generated energy. His home near the center of town, built about 1890, is heated by burning wood pellets, and his water is heated electrically. In general, he said, Friends of the Earth supports the city’s environmental goals.

Yet he added, “In the short-term view, of course, it’s better to burn the garbage in Oslo than to leave it in Leeds or Bristol.”

But “in the long term,” he said, “no.”

不夠發電用！ 北歐各國搶垃圾
廢物變黃金… 海運便宜 挪威奧斯陸 擬從美國進口

挪威首都奧斯陸面臨一個許多其他城市都樂於分享的問題：垃圾不夠多。

紐約時報報導，奧斯陸一半以上的暖氣來自垃圾焚化爐產生的電力，但市民的垃圾分類資源回收做得太好，導致垃圾不夠燒，必須仰賴外國垃圾，包括向一千兩百公里以外的愛爾蘭進口垃圾。但奧斯陸面臨激烈的競爭。例如瑞典，就說服了數個挪威城鎮提供垃圾給斯德哥爾摩。

奧斯陸垃圾發電部門的主管米克森表示：「我正打算從美國進口垃圾，反正海運算便宜。」

北歐各國的焚化爐每年可處理七億噸的垃圾，但送入焚化爐的只有一點五億噸，連四分之一都不到。垃圾發電最近幾十年在歐洲北部很流行。瑞典、德國、奧地利、荷蘭仍在興建焚化爐，對垃圾的需求超過供應，垃圾搶得很凶。奧斯陸垃圾發電部門的資深顧問奧博思文說：「現在有個歐洲垃圾市場，垃圾成為商品，市場正在成長。」

英國人也參上一腳，但不算是大咖。設在約克夏的公司收集英格蘭北部城市里茲等地的垃圾後運往北歐，一個月的船載量高達一千噸。里茲市發言人考克斯表示，英國政府對垃圾掩埋場課稅，讓里茲等城市樂於將垃圾運往北歐。

挪威名列全球前十大石油和天然氣的輸出國，燃煤蘊藏豐富，還有一千一百多座水力發電廠，怎麼會搞到要進口垃圾來發電，讓人匪夷所思。米克森解釋：「燒垃圾所發的電屬於再生能源，可降低對化石燃料的依賴。」

歐洲其他城市製造很多垃圾，像是義大利南部的那不勒斯，街頭的垃圾山曾引起國際關注，還得付錢給德國和荷蘭的城鎮幫忙消化部分垃圾。

奧斯陸考慮過義大利的垃圾，但最後還是決定選擇比較乾淨和安全的英國垃圾。為甚麼？米克森回答：「這是個敏感的問題。」

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/world/europe/oslo-copes-with-shortage-of-garbage-it-turns-into-energy.html

2013-05-01．聯合報．A14．國際．編譯張佑生