Two Problems, One Solution

I remember a long time ago, I was watching late night TV and flipping from one infomercial to another. As it happened, I switched from one infomercial advertising sex chat lines to another infomercial asking for donations to help feed famine stricken regions across the world. Apparently, there were a lot of horny people out there who would pay a lot of money for someone at the other end of the phone. On the other hand, it also seemed possible to feed an entire family in some third world country for an entire day just for the price of a cup of coffee. There were referring to just regular coffee, too. If it were coffee from Starbucks, you could probably feed an entire village for an entire week. But I digress....

Anyway, there it occurred to me that we could end world hunger if we could only get starving people to talk dirty over the phone. It is, as Joe de Venecia pre-NBN-ZTE scandal would say, a win-win proposition.

Kidding aside, it appears that we also have two problems that can solve each other.

Well, there's the growing trash problem perennially hounding our country. Metro Manila alone produces some 7,000 tons of trash daily. We are always running out of landfills when we could dump our trash. These landfills themselves give rise to a host of other problems such as pollution and the inevitable rise of squatter colonies.

And then, there's the energy problem. With fuel prices going up, electricity rates shouldn't be far behind.

If only we could turn the enormous amounts of trash we generate into electricity. Ah, but there is. And it's not the harvesting of methane from landfills. There are numerous problems associated with methane harvesting. First, the landfill has to be properly lined so that toxic materials do not seep out and contaminated groundwater. We don't really have a good record in developing the proper landfill, do we? Second, methane can not be harvested until the landfill is capped. That means that while the landfill is still operational, methane and other pollutants would be released in the air.

Plasma gasification. That's the process where high heat and high pressure turns carbon based materials to fuel which could then be used to generate electricity. It would not violate the Clean Air Act as it does not involve incineration and no toxic fumes are released into the atmosphere.

Now the only thing we need is to find a way for some administration flunkie to make an obscene amount of money brokering this deal. Maybe Ben Abalos can make this his "last hurrah," what with that ZTE-NBN deal falling through.