Burn your garbage to produce electricity. It works and the stacks can be scrubbed. We put out clean stack discharge here in America. Go after China and India if you want to reduce pollution.
What all the world needs now and for centuries to come, is cheap and plentiful energy. “Fossil fuels” (and that is a misnomer) provide a bridge until such time as a much safer form of nuclear power is made available. The older form, uranium-fueled light water reactors, has a number of rather severe limitations, one of which is that the “spent” fuel which cannot any longer produce sufficient energy to supply the reactions necessary to maintain the nuclear chain reaction, and are contaminated with plutonium, a deadly and long-lived isotope which can be used to make dirty nuclear bombs.
But technology has gone far to update and replace the uranium-fueled plants, using a thorium-fueled molten salt reactor that is inherently much safer, and also cheaper to set up and run. The fuel, thorium, is both more plentiful and much safer to handle than uranium, and it is not capable of runaway “China syndrome” overheating and meltdown. And one of the more important advantages, it NEEDS a small amount of a “spent” uranium fuel rod to initiate and sustain a nuclear reaction in the molten salt solution, so eventually the stockpiles of “spent” uranium fuel rods will be used up. There is a small amount of atomic “ash” left over when thorium reactors are recharged, but its volume is both much smaller, and composed of relatively short-lived atomic isotopes, in contrast to the uranium fuel rods.
These thorium-fueled molten salt reactors generate an enormous amount of heat, which could be used not only for electric power generation, but the heat could be used to drive a number of other processes, including the distillation of brackish water to make fresh potable water, and to power any number of industrial level formulation applications, like the thermal depolymerization of organic wastes, to make a very good grade of kerogen, the feedstock from which “fossil fuels” are fractionated.
A new age is dawning upon the world, if only some long-standing superstitions and taboos can be put aside.
It’s staggering how many people oppose this. They’d rather fill up landfills and then complain about how many landfills there are than do something that actually works and produces electricity at the same time.