Clean energy recovery on housing horizon Residences will produce all their own needs with no carbon footprint
Like most things in life, respecting our environment begins in the home. And as far as dispensing with household waste is concerned, the average domicile has settled into what is popularly termed the three R’s: reduce, reuse and recycle. No doubt, some people whose sky is a different colour just settle on one out of three, shoving a blue box to the curb once a week, as in “There, my job is done. Now I can go to Walmart and get more stuff.” But even at three for three, in the deepest sense of keeping Mother Nature’s nice blue and green planet tidy, we have not rounded third base. There is a fourth R at bat. It is neither short for Rest nor Relaxation. And the three on base won’t mean enough at the end of the game if the fourth doesn’t come home, so to speak. We find ourselves with the proverbial bases loaded with the three R’s. So what’s the fourth R? Next up is recovery of clean energy. Garbage encompasses a broad spectrum: Things we no longer want in the house that end up in deep holes buried for eternity or (not that long ago) black smoke coughed up by carbon munching mechanical contraptions that made us feel like we had cleaned up after ourselves. Out of sight, out of mind. The house of the future will have no carbon print. Zero. It will generate all of its own energy needs cleanly. Sounds like science fiction, huh? Well, most of what we enjoy today would be considered fantasy a hundred years ago. I know a 100-year-old lady who remembers bi-planes flying over her head in the First World War. Today, she has a laptop and a cellphone. There is a new housing development in Candiac, a one-of-akind in Quebec. The 148 townhouses will be designed with either profit generating rooftop gardens or solar panels. The organic gardens will be managed by an experienced outfit, and the produce sold to restaurants. Meanwhile, the solar panels will generate up to two months worth of electricity for each home. It’s a good start. The latter is an example of the fourth R. When you think about it, shouldn’t every home have solar panels? In speaking with contractors, I have been told that it is presently a question of paying more for new construction, with the added expense of equipment like a solar control panel — a computer controlled house. Still sound like science fiction? One day soon we may see a government edict passed down that obliges all new houses to be built with solar panels as a standard. That’s just a beginning. The future home will need to supplant the (away) big garbage incinerators and landfill operations. By that, I mean home compact, uber-clean incinerators that will send garbage trucks the way of milk delivery vans. Here is the future: Your home energy smart management system not only controls the solar energy (or some new clean form of energy invented like fusion) tapped but also the perfect conversion of your trash into clean energy. Don’t ask me how, but I know it will be so. The home with a zero carbon footprint, and no waste and no hook up to (gasp) Hydro-Québec. High-tech pollution control technology will eventually evolve when it is no longer more economical to send our garbage to landfills, and so reduce the latter’s methane emissions. Methane is 21 per cent more lethal as a global warmer than carbon dioxide. For every ton of trash we incinerate cleanly, a ton of greenhouse gas emissions will be circumvented. The fourth R: Recovery of energy from what we now just bury. In a world that can no longer absorb our pollution, the future is at our collective doorstep.