The headline on the story on the Huffington Post reads 99 Per Cent Of Sweden's Garbage Is Now Recycled, which sounds really great until you find out that they are recycling it by using it for fuel, which sounds a whole lot like the incinerators everyone used to use until we got fed up with choking on smog. Now incinerators were a bit primitive, their only purpose in life was to turn trash to ash. Any heat they generated was just another waste by-product to be disposed of as cheaply as possible, which meant sending it up the smoke stack with all the smoke. So we are making a little progress here in that we are trying to recover some of that energy and use it for something useful LIKE NOT BUYING OIL FROM SAUDI ARABIA*, which as you may know is the biggest source of problems on our planet. Supposedly we have developed some techniques for burning trash without generating as many nasty chemicals. CO2 is not one. You can bet that these plants are generating plenty of CO2.
I went looking for some pictures of these super-efficient Swedish trash burners, but I didn't find much and what I found was pretty generic, industrial type installations. But other places in Europe are also getting into the act and some of their projects have a bit of, shall we say, flair, like the one shown above. Denmark in particular seems to be jumping in with both feet with these props that have escaped from a science fiction movie:
*whether Saudi Arabia is a problem or not depends, I suppose, on whether you think slicing up your neighbors with swords is an acceptable pasttime. I mean it's kind of hard to argue with history. Killing your neighbors has been the world's most popular sport for zillions of years. Widespread peace and cooperation is kind of an anomaly.
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