I hesitate to jump in here, not being a chemist or anything. I have an opinion. First, why try to save the world from garbage? Carl is right. We just need to make less of it, and what we make needs to be more friendly to recycle. It is impractical for a homeowner or small landholder to finance and install what needs to be an industrial scale process to be at least somewhat efficient? We have already had that discussion multiple times. Second, lets talk energy density. Why would you want to burn forest floor sweepings, when there is so much air and ash and sorting involved, and take away nutrients that will go back to the forest floor soil to be made into carbon-dense hardwoods? How many truckloads of dead leaves does it take to equal a truckload of Oak chunks or pellets? Build a gasifier based on wood, or charcoal. We know that works and is cost effective down to homeowner backyard usage, or will scale up as large as anyone would want to feed. This technology is only good if you can feed your chosen system day after day, reliably. Many on this site have emphasized that reality repeatedly. 
Wow!!! I didnāt know about lye. But it makes sense. You neutralize acid with base. We have plenty of that around. Its just the potassium in wood ash, forms KOH in water. Can you tell me more about how to actually do this? Thank you.
Rindert
I think we need to put human greed and jealousy to work for us. If we can just point out away for a greedy businessman to become a billionaire by using trash somehow. Then Iām sure jealous people will find ways so that they donāt make any trash. āWhy you wanna put money in his pocket?ā [voice like winey dog] LOL
Rindert
Cow,
Iāve long thought that we could ferment waste food into ethanol. Check that out. Also, if you want to look into alcohol production, check out http://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com. The author has a great book for alcohol production. There are lots of advantages of ethanol over wood.
I would like to hear more about that chemistry too. But I think the lye can be heated and reduced again? How would the nasties be collected? Or is the idea to leave them bound to lye?
I owned stock in a Canadian company that lost this market
I think the only way to make money is to pull out the easily salvaged metals, especially aluminum and copper wiring, out of the waste stream. (which has been done throughout human history). Most rich folks that made their own fortune are not dumb enough to try to cash in on squeezing blood out of a turnip. Like getting fuel out of plastic waste. Now, if some municipality or governing body will pay you big money to engineer a waste treatment / recycling plant to solve a problem that they will pay for, that is using other peoplesā money which is how the rich get rich. 
We at work have lye scrubbers, we pump huge amounts of weak lye solution over vapors that contain a lot of sulfur compounds. The sulfur bonds to NaOH and forms sodium sulfate mainly, relatively harmless substance.
Ha, with plastic, its even simpler. Process is the same but since most halovenated plastics contain just clorine, (PVC) it will react with lye to make NaCl or a kichen salt solution. Flourine NaF etcā¦ salt is harmless but the other stuff can esyly be recycled (to obtain raw Florine and bromine again).
With lime, we get calcium salts. I belive calcium fluoride is used in steel industry as a flux and calcium cloride is a road defrost agent.
Mike, l agree 100% on lowering or even stoping the use of harmless materials, but lets be realisticā¦ with todays mentaliti its utopia.
Probably so, but the reality is that markets drive what is produced. Plastic is VERY marketable, so it will forever be producedā¦
also, I keep wondering why we arenāt feeding all this food waste to animals. seems obvious ā¦
It is true. It would be very hard to stop consuming plastic goods, or perhaps, it would just be very expensive. I often fantasize about trying to cut plastic out of my life entirely, but it would be a very tough job.
As for food waste - I seem to recall there being some hang up about food-borne illness. Its probably rooted in our country being overly litigious. If anything you do could open you up to legal liability, its probably cheaper in the ālong runā to just be wasteful. Of course our thinking probably does not project as far into the future as it ought to.
With good organisation and discipline anything can be done. But with food waste, the story is specialy sad. Its sayd a third of food ends in the trash, to me that is outrageous.
We have near 0 food waste. Just banana and citrus peels. Its true, all of our āwasteā (peels mainly) gets recycled right away by our animals but nevertheless we learned to cook the right amount and if for some reasons a meal is not finished we eat it later. This last part seems the hardest to most people. Some rather starve thain warm up some left over lunch for diner. Why is that so hard to do???
Growing your own food has a hidden bennefit. You make damn sure your hard work gets used up to the last crumble!
I donāt know where that 1/3 rd of food wasted figure comes from but I sure wasnāt raised that way but maybe I am old and old fashioned. We used to cut away mold on bread and eat the rest!
I know we are a little bit off topic here, but I wonder if the ā1/3ā food wasted number comes from restaurants. When I was a kid, back in the 1950ās, I worked for a farmer who raised pigs. We had a daily run to town to pick up the food garbage from a couple of restuarants. Each one yielded about three 55 gallon drums of, what we called āslopā. It all went to the pigs,
I did a lot of research on this subject to prepare some lesson plans a couple years ago. Everyone had different numbers. But everyone agrees that food waste is ridiculous and not driven by common sense.
Amen k. If you grow it, you donāt waste it.
I think youāre right Carl. Fear of getting sued keeps us from doing reasonable things. Nevada, I think, had a shield law in place allowing hog farmers to feed food wasteā¦ With restrictions of course. Lots of casino foodr waste goes to hogs .
Don, I think the 1/3 number comes about 50 percent from the food that never leaves the farm because it is not asthetically suitable for market.
Another huge portion you can find in the dumpster behind Aldi, Publix, and Winn Dixie. Great place to get food by the way.
As I understand it, restaurant waste is a lot worse than it should be, but not as bad as those two. The biggest wasters of the restaurants are the buffet style obviously, all you can eat (waste) places are my favorite because of the variety, but they tend to anger me when I see someone get whole plates of food and just leave it on the table untouched.
As for the other topicā¦ Like the commercial says āplastics make it possibleā .
DAM!! Donāt encourage our road commissioner to use more calcium cloride on our roads by making it ācheaperā. That is the reason where we live is called the ārust beltā.
In our house hold, that is considered a āfree mealā. Hope that doesnāt make me a pig because iām eating their āslopā.
TomC
Not actually off topic but yesterday I read an article about the worldwide reduction in human activity caused carbon emissions contribution due to lock-in at home Covid-19 measures.
I believe the phenomoma is true. We live under a 35 miles out flyway to the Portland, OR intenational airports. Not many jets flying. Much less driving around traffic. Much, much less comrecial traffic and manufacturing around us noticeably.
Ha! The āwomenā in my household are generating a lot of shipped-in Amazon cardboard boxes now. I canāt hardly keep ahead burning these in the wood stove.
I do distrust the article quotes claim percentages though. The have no way of actually knowing. Only ācalculateā.
So on Opās topic to me it is simple.
Voluntarily contribute Less to the trash problem. Aint no perfect. Just DO take reasonable responsibilities for what you do contribute.
Or . . . . blithely hog-out and let the wastes problems of your own lazinessās be handled by Someone Elseās.; Somewhere out there: just as long as it is done out of your sight. The W.A.L.L.I. way.
I choose not to be others; Elseās cleaning up drudge, for their artistic and consumer wastes.
S.U.
About a decade ago or so, I read about a municipally owned utility in Missouri that started replacing coal with waste paper pellets. Worked great! That is, until the EPA found out. They could only use a small percentage as a fuel supplement because they had a permit to be a coal fired power plant. To use paper would require a new permit. $$$$$$.
In 2009, I attended the Univ of Minnesota/Morris for their three week biomass gasification course. The university had a huge gasifier feeding a turbine for power plus used GEKās in a classroom setting.
The economics professor involved in the course picked my brain as one coming from Louisiana. They were in the prairies where corn is king. I came from the Deep South where Pine is king. I told him about my passion for using waste. He told me about a grant they were working on to do just that. The idea was to put a gasifier at the big stores like Walmart to consume the OCC waste (Old Corrugated Container). The gasifier would feed a generator to make some if not all the power needed by the store. Cummins was one of the participants but sadly, the grant never became reality.
An uncle retired as an exec with a utility. He told me about a waste incineration project in St. Louis that had great potentialā¦ until it came time to find a suitable location. Thatās when I first heard the term NIMBY. Not In My Back Yard. Everybody loved the idea of diverting trash from the landfill but no one wanted garbage trucks converging in their neighborhoods for the cogen project.