Trash Gas: The New Clean Energy Source?
St. Lucie County, Florida, USA, has a plan to solve two problems with one solution. The problems are waste disposal and energy production, and the solution is to disintegrate trash using plasma arcs, and cultivate the gas to turn turbines. There will be emissions from the process, but the emissions are supposedly far less than conventional power plants, like natural gas. Given that it also eliminates trash, the emissions are probably acceptable. This process is also known as Plasma Gasification.
According to the USA Today article, the plasma facility will vaporize 3,000 tons of trash per day, and produce 120 megawatts of electricity (per day? per month? they don’t say) that can be contributed to the power grid. The plant itself will use 1/3 of the power that it produces, so once started, it is self-sustaining.
Aside from gas emissions, the plant will also produce 600 tons per day of a rock-like material called slag, which they plan to sell as a cheap material to be used in road construction. I wonder if the slag will have some environmental toxicity…
The company behind the project is Geoplasma LLC, of Atlanta, Georgia. They are funding the entire $450 million project themselves, and expect it to pay for itself over 20 years.
Although there are questions about the environmental impact of trash-gas and trash-slag, this technology seems like a great idea for reducing the amount of waste in landfill sites, and for producing electricity. An even better solution to the landfill problem would be to force manufacturers to use less packaging materials — 4.5 lbs of garbage per person per day is a crazy amount of garbage. In addition to reducing the amount of packaging materials that are used, we should enact legislation to force manufacturers to use biodegradable materials. Anyways, a very good application of plasma technology would be in sewage disposal. Instead of dumping our sewage into the ocean, it could be sent to a plasma facility and converted into electricity. Sewage would probably produce a lot less “slag” than trash, and given that it is organic, its gas emissions would probably be less toxic as well.
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