So it goes into the sky instead? That seems more sightly, but the CO2 emissions must be astronomical.
After the combustion we're left with 15-20% by weight in slag; some of this is metal that is recovered and sent to recycling, but the rest is effectively gravel that is used in e.g. road construction and the like. There's also 3-5% by weight of toxic gases captured by the exhaust gas treatment. This is sent to a special facility in Norway that more or less puts it in landfill, although a very carefully managed one.
Why not nuclear/renewables?
Renewables we already do burn quite a bit of. But really, quite a lot of household waste is actually renewable too - cardboard packaging, food scraps that didn't end up in the compost, such things. So it's really not that bad.
Waste accounts for about 20% of the total energy required for heating in Sweden.
Electric heaters get you 100% efficiency. Heat pumps get you 400%+ efficiency.
It should also be mentioned that Swedish electricity generation is effectively 100% renewable already; it's mainly wind, hydro and nuclear. The co-generation plants mainly produce heating and only a small amount of electricity, more or less as a byproduct.
Waste incineration has a more or less negligible carbon footprint if you look at the big picture.
Modern heat pumps are really good (like 400%+ efficient), and run on electricity.
The end goal should include a carbon capture step. They’ve looked into that here in Oslo, Norway, but it ended up much costlier than anticipated and at the moment it looks like it’s going to be very very drawn out.
Carbon capture at the source is usually not that terrible of an idea. Trying to capture carbon from the air around us is very challenging, but if the air is 80% CO2 to begin with it’s going to be much cheaper to capture half of it then trying to capture the same amount from regular air.
I heard that a good way to capture carbon on a bigger scale would be through burning trees and capturing the carbon. Store the carbon in a concentrated form, use the heat to produce electricity and when you chop down trees to burn you also make space for growing new trees. Sounds kinda slow though, and not exactly cheap either.
If all the externalities get priced in, you can let people decide for themselves what they want and need.
If you want to sequester the carbon, just cut down the trees and bury them. The problem is that there isn't enough trees on Earth to power civilization or sequester enough carbon.
We have a lot of hydroelectric power, but that’s very dependent on how much it rained in the autumn. We are also starting to build out wind power, but it’s slow going.
We do import a lot of electricity from further south in Europe where there is more wind and solar.
I would love to have solar on my roof. The legislation is super complicated though since I live in an apartment and we would basically have to create our own communal energy company. We would also have to pay taxes on the electricity we produce and use ourselves. It’s somewhat simpler for people that own a house, but I’m not quite rich enough to own a house in Oslo.