Waste to Energy Conversion Technology

Foreword

Floyd Hasselriis

Albert Einstein observed that ‘scientists investigate that which already is; engineers create that which has never been.’ The history of waste to energy (WTE) is a long story of learning, experimenting and evolution. The chapters in this book tell this story from many different points of view. Engineers have been working on the recovery of the energy in wastes from the time that steam engines for power and electric generation were first in operation in the late 1800s. The first ‘destructor’ in England, built in Manchester in 1876, was reported to be operating 30 years later.¹

Joseph G. Branch, the chairman of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), self-published a comprehensive book on the subject of ...