Down in the Dumps
Hello again, looks like I didn't get time to finish this before I finished work, but look how good I am, doing it the same day anyway!
My dormitory, Komaba International Lodge, gets a lot of advertisements for various events and things to do and see, usually promoting Japanese language or culture in some way. There was one such ad that took my eye several weeks ago, for the Suginami Waste Disposal Plant. I thought this was a slightly strange thing to tour, but at the same time it was a day that I had no other plans, so I duly signed up.
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| Plus it has a big claw, who can say no to that? |
Turning up at the plant, which I could identify by the enormous smoke stack that jutted out from the horizon, I was surprised to see a large number of school children and foreigners of a similar age to me - this was evidently quite the tour! The children upon closer inspection came from a Nepalese school, and the adults were from a variety of countries on numerous exchange programs.
Walking into the plant, I could see it was not like any I'd really seen before - it was super clean and modern, and the first thing we walked through was akin to a museum, with panels in Japanese and English describing Tokyo's waste disposal history, including the "Waste Wars" of the 1960-70s, where there was relatively unrestrained disposal with little future proofing in mind, as well as significant NIMBY-ism as to where future waste disposal facilities may go. Then, walking to a big media hall, we passed hundreds of drawings by school children, describing themes around recycling, environmentalism and such like. Again, not like any waste disposal plant I'd ever been to!
We were all assigned translators (which was helpful when it came to listening about ammonia filtration systems), and sat down at desks in a very swish media hall. The GM of the plant gave a speech, as did various managers of the composite divisions, and then we watched a short video. After that, it was time for a game, which was all about the division of rubbish. Each of Tokyo's 23 wards have slightly different waste disposal sorting systems, and so we were put into teams, with a collection of items, which we had to sort into plastic, paper, glass bottles, metal, combustibles, incombustibles, and then bulky/hazardous items. After we raced the clock to sort these, a video played showing what went where, and raucous applause followed successful teams with their division. It all felt a bit strange, an overenthusiastic appraisal of rubbish sorting, but then again, I went along with it.
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| Apparently leather belts and shoes fall into combustible |
First of all, rubbish trucks come in and dump their contents into various doors. Each day it handles over 700 trucks, with each containing up to a tonne of waste. This rubbish then falls into a 12,000 cubic metre space, which was, quite frankly, enormous. There was a giant, Toy Story-esque claw that was periodically picking up huge clumps and then dropping it back down, apparently to aerate the rubbish and dry it out somewhat, so as to optimise the burn from the incinerator.
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| Dimensions of the space |
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| Picking up rubbish |
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| Dropping rubbish |
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| A view straight down to the door used by the rubbish trucks |
We then moved along to the "brain" of the plant, which started with the steam turbines that generate energy released by the incineration. It generates tens of thousands of kilowatts a day, which is used to run the plant, and with excess being sold into the grid (at the time we were there, they had put around 10,000 kW into the grid so far, and this was at around 2pm). What followed reminded me somewhat of the tour scene from Jurassic Park, when the guests are strapped in to a moving viewing platform, going around the various labs and so. Except here we were walking, and it was just a couple of rooms, mostly of people looking intently at computer screens, as though they were really wanting to impress upon us that they were doing something, and that it wasn't entirely the completely automated computer system doing the work... Also what was funny to me was there was a group of guys who were wearing hard hats the entire time, as though they were afraid of blunt force trauma to the head in the computer room.
Then it went along to the boiler zones, where workers maintained flows of steam to the generators (helmets might be more appropriate here), but I was mostly impressed by how clean the place was; it was impeccable. From here we were also granted another view of the waste chamber, this time from further up, and directly above
Next up was the part that appealed to the pyro in all of us - the incinerator! This thing burns 600 tonnes of rubbish a day, using 800C flames to turn rubbish into ash with 1/20th the volume of the original material. There is a little observation room, where at the push of a button a small hatch opens to reveal the inferno inside, which looked like quite the conflagration.
Finally we went through the pipes that serve as the gas scrubbers, cleaning the emissions to be pretty well pure air, with a very small amount of nitrogen added. The tour guides were very emphatic in stating the plant voluntarily adheres to stricter emission guidelines than those imposed by government, and that it makes air that is cleaner than much of Tokyo. The tour ended back in the media hall, where they showcased their plant wide garden projects, including their rose garden, all in the name of beautifying the facility. One thing that made me guffaw though was when they mentioned the variety of rose they had chosen. Completely unironically, they showed us this beautifully pink rose, which is called "Anne Frank". Whether there was some "poetic" about face/metaphor going on, or some incredible naivete I do not know, but it made me splutter a bit as you can imagine!
The very last thing of the tour was the ashiyu foot bath. The facility generates a huge amount of heat from the incinerator, and from this a lot of steam is made for the turbines. Once this water has condensed, it is still very warm, and so is pumped through a big bathtub about 20 metres long and 2 metres wide for people to use. The signage in the pool room said it was designed to bring people together and think about uses for waste, rather than just throwing it away. Whatever the reasoning, it was very pleasant and not at all what you'd imagine doing after touring a waste disposal facility!
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| Legs or sausages? |
All in all it was a very interesting tour, something I would not normally ever think of as a thing to do, but it was highly informative, well run, and made for some good views/photographs!
On a totally different note, and chronologically out of order (also thematically not accurate), so really better suited for the other blog (but I didn't have those photos on me at the time so I couldn't do it, last weekend Claire and I met up with Valeria, one of the people we met on our AFS trip in 2011. Obviously we had kept in touch over facebook during the past 7 years, but to see her in person for the first time in such a long time was great. The three of us wandered around the Imperial Gardens on a very hot day, saw the ruined foundations of a castle that burnt down in 1657 or so, and generally caught up.
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| One helluva lamp |
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| Please rest at your disposal. Thank you , I might just do that. |
Tomorrow Claire and I are going to the Mori Digital Museum in Odaiba, which I am super excited for, as not only is it time with Claire, but also it is a pure spectacle AND opportunity for some very cool photography - I can already predict I will go back as I realise tomorrow I need some particular piece of equipment that I neglected to take first time. But needless to say, you can expect a blog of that in the near future!
But til then, tata for now!
Troy
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