Fly ash - a wasted resource?

摘要

It is time Australia stopped treating fly ash from coal-fired power generation as a waste and started to regard it as a valuable resource with many end-uses, according to Professor Colin Ward of the CRC for Coal in Sustainable Development and University of NSW.rn'Australia's 40 power stations produce 12-13 million tonnes of fly ash a year, only a sixth of which currently goes to economic products like cement and concrete,' Professor Ward said. 'Most of it is currently used as landfill and is both a cost and a lost opportunity.'rnProfessor Ward said there was a lot more which could be done with fly ash. He said that, contrary to common opinion, fly ash produced from the burning of Australian coals was low in toxic elements by world standards, and most of these are locked up in any case and unlikely to leach out.