Problems garbage collection

This is a vital problem for liquefaction and has failed in the advanced German trials. In Japan, liquefaction has first to defeat incineration, the technique that has prevailed in most municipahties. The rate of incineration in municipalities has reached 80% or so and 40 million tons of garbage are incinerated every year. From this point of view, the reduction of collection and baling costs as described above is an easy way to achieve this. Second is the question of how to reduce the liquefaction cost compared with those for the other feedstock recycling methods, such as application in the iron and steel industry and gasification for ammonia synthesis. These methods have the merits discussed above. On the other hand, liquefaction has many weak points, it is small in scale, complicated with a mixed raw material for fine technology, and has a low degree of operation, 50% or so. 

There are two main problems in recovering economically usehil materials from MSW. First, MSW is found as a highly heterogeneous mixture which is extremely hard to sort. At least, this is the case in the city of Nairobi, even in the area in which I live. Second, the materials are not found in sufficient quantities in a particular place. Rather, they are thinly spread over a very wide area and, in most cases, some of the places are not easily accessible because of poor roads or none at all. Consequently, private garbage collectors do not collect garbage from such places. In any case, most of residents in these areas cannot afford the collection fees charged by private garbage collectors. 

In a few communities, recycled materials are placed into bags (usually blue in color) and collected in the same vehicles, standard compactor trucks, and at the same time as the garbage. When the load is dumped, the blue bags (and sometimes other readily identifiable recyclable materials) are sorted out. While some of these systems seem to work reasonably well, others have experienced significant contamination problems. Even without losses... 

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