Britain's Energy Gap: A Rubbish Solution.
The Bolton Thermal Recovery Facility, (a refuse incinerator connected to a steam turbine), generates enough energy for 7000 homes, by burning 125,000 tonnes of refuse per year. ( http://www.gmwaste.co.uk/trf.asp )According to H.M. Government, the average household produes 1.2 tonnes of waste per year. ( http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nscl.asp?ID=7020&RT=128&PG=1 ). A quick calculation shows that if all our municipal waste were incinerated in similar facilities, it would meet nearly 7% of our total energy requirements. Furthermore, since a certain proportion of all municipal waste constitutes biomass, (wood, cardboard, old banana skins etc), the sequestration of CO2 produced in the combustion process, another simple process, over time would actually reduce the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, compensating the efforts of fossil fuel combustion to wreck our ecology.
This is because the carbon present in biomass is derived from trees and plants, which extract it from the atmosphere. Of course reliable, permanent carbon sequestration is still a relatively untested concept.