Day Eight: Mapo Resource Recovery Plant
- williamskayli23
- May 21, 2024
- 2 min read
Today our study abroad group visited the Mapo Resource Recovery Plant in Mapo-gu, Seoul. The Mapo Resource Recovery Plant is one of five urban waste management facilities for the city of Seoul. This facility was originally built in 2005 and is one of the oldest waste management facilities, created to aid in the treatment of the landfill site now known as World Cup Park. The waste management facility is part of a collaboration between the city of Seoul and the private companies Samjung Environment Technology and Environment Management Company. The Mapo Resource Recovery Plant has six stages within its waste management process, all focused on limiting the environmental impacts of hazardous gas emissions.
The first stage, sorting of the waste, sifts through over 2,000 tons of waste to minimize the size of the waste so that it will be easier to incinerate and use less energy during the incineration process(like removing garbage from garbage bags).
Next, the sorted waste goes through an incinerator which burns over 1,000 degrees Celsius. It is interesting to note that South Korea regulates incinerator temperatures at around 800 degrees Celsius; however, the Mapo plant chooses to incinerate trash at over 900 degrees since they believe that burning trash at lower temperatures produces more carbon dioxide. The Mapo plant reduces its greenhouse gas emissions by burning trash at higher temperatures.
While the trash is incinerated, the waste heat produced from it goes to a waste heat boiler where water temperatures are raised along with the heat during incineration to produce combustion gases at cooling temperatures of 850 to 200 degrees Celsius, which is below the re-synthesis temperatures for dioxins (which are maximized at temperatures around 300 to 400 degrees Celsius). The result of collecting steam is to produce energy from the waste and use it to run their plant as well as nearby residential areas.
Next, steam within the boiler enters the semi-dry reactor where lime slurry (calcium hydroxide within water) is introduced to remove acid gas (a mix of hazardous chemicals like hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, etc.). Afterward, the steam enters a bag filter where dust, dioxin, and hazardous metals are carefully filtered. Next, it then goes through the selective catalytic reduction tower and the police filter where the removal of NOx (nitric oxide and nitric dioxide-which affects the senses and can cause chronic lung disease) and other air pollutants so that the Mapo plant's total dioxin emission is below 0.01ng TEQ/Sm3 (below Seoul's dioxin emission limit, 0.1ng TEQ/Sm3). It was so interesting to learn how waste management is done and to see environmental emphasis being integrated into waste management. I was surprised to see how much emphasis was placed on emissions and any environmental impacts the plant would produce as a result of its work and ways in which the plant could give back to its community like educational programs and energy produced from waste.
Below is a pdf showing a flowing chart that visualizes the stages of waste management.
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