On the industrial flats south of Perth, Australia's first energy from waste plant has hit full stride. At Kwinana, truckloads of red bin rubbish that once headed for landfill, up to 460,000 tonnes of it a year, now feed a furnace that drives a turbine around the clock, generating 38 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 55,000 homes. In its first three months of full operation the plant kept about 90,000 tonnes of carbon emissions out of the sky compared with landfilling, and each year it will pull more than 10,000 tonnes of metal from the ash and send it back to be recycled.
The order of things still matters, and the operators say so themselves: reduce first, reuse next, recycle everything that can be recycled, and only then turn what truly remains into power rather than burying it. A second plant at East Rockingham is close behind, built to handle another 300,000 tonnes and power around 36,000 more homes. Between them, the two facilities will turn a great slice of the city's unrecyclable waste into light and heat instead of landfill gas. Somewhere in Perth tonight, a kettle is boiling on last month's rubbish, and that is a genuinely new kind of good news.
Our short take: reported by Energy Magazine and Waste Management Review; the plant is operated by ACCIONA.