After leaving Muju today, we headed back into Jeonju for a tour of the Jeonju Multimedia Promotion Agency. Jeonju is working on becoming a Korean film mecca, and the local government has financially backed an agency devoted to cultivating film producers, sound technicians and editors. The Jeonju International Film Festival starts just as we’re leaving at the end of this month. We’re a little disappointed we’ll miss it!
We met up with a few rotary clubs for a nice lunch at a Chinese restaurant and then packed back into the yellow bus for a tour of the province’s waste incinerator center. Some of you know about my heartfelt love for trash and what happens to it, so it’s definitely on my list for one of the best tours so far.
When I worked for Keep Tennessee Beautiful, I used to love touring landfills and incinerators. This is the first plant I’ve been to though that converts waste into energy. I was surprised to learn that Korea is the world’s tenth largest energy consumer (Geographically, South Korea is roughly the size of Indiana). Because of limited space, Korea is quickly running out of room to store its trash, and composting waste is phasing out because there is no where to put the sludge that is produced through compost. Historically this sludge has been released into the ocean, which not only is toxic for fish and plant life, but produces huge amounts of methane when it mixes with seawater. Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, has committed to a ban of waste water disposal into the ocean by 2013.
On top of all this, Korea imports 97% of its energy. It’s become not only an environmental issue to invest in converting waste to energy, but a crucial economic one as well.
The type of plant we visited today is called RDF (refuse-derived fuel), which takes combustible solid waste to produce energy. Thirty-five of these plants exist in Korea, and more are under development. The Jeonju facility takes trash from 3 neighboring cities (which it has a tough time keeping up with that volume alone) and in addition, has a 10 year backlog of trash that has been compacted into white storage cells all waiting to be burned.
I took a really great video today (it involves giant cranes that look like transformers, breaking apart all the trash bags and shredding them to make them more incinerator friendly) but unfortunately I can’t get it uploaded due to size. Here are a few photos of the plant. Click here for a bit more info on RDF in Korea.
Oh, and if you’re interested in seeing how Tennessee composts our trash (in progressive East TN, that is...we landfill it in West TN), I found an old blog entry from when I visited the Sevier County plant a few years back.
A view of trash going in...
The incinerator control room where they monitor heat levels and if everything is burning as it should.
This is the guy that operates the shredding crane...so cool!
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