joker.iki.fi

As a testimony to how Helsinki likes to piss on their own back yard, the man wants to build a garbage-burning “energy” plant to eastern Helsinki, more precisely, in Kivikko, quite near where I live. To prevent this from happening, please sign the petition against the project (in finnish)!

If you need more reasons to sign, here you go:

• This well be even worse environmentally than burning coal or oil. The waste is incinerated using oil, coal or gas to achieve a high burn temperature. So not only you get the traditional problems with these fuels, you get the toxins that result from burning plastics and various other materials found in common household trash
• Net energy output of this power plant will be negative (meaning that it uses more energy than it produces). The trash is carried there from various places using diesel trucks and then incinerated using gas and oil. They keep the burn temperature very high, because this way you are supposed to get less pollutants (except that you don’t really). At these temperatures the efficiency of the heat-to-electricity conversion is very poor.
• Like I said, the trash is carried there using trucks. Guess which is the road they’ll be driving to Kivikko? Right. Kehä (Ring) I, which we all know is crowded in the first place, and now they are aiming to cram hundreds of trucks more there.
• Burning trash does not solve the trash problem and it does not solve the energy problem either. It is just politically more pleasant to generate invisible toxins and greenhouse gasses than it is to have, well, dumps and landfills.

So there you go. Sign the petition, vote against ALL elected representatives that are involved in stupid plans like this and write to the involved parties (more info here).

There are alternatives to this plan, it just means that some suits are going to have to work a bit harder.