An End to Landfills?
By Derek Reiber
Sound too good to be true? Think again.
Often described as 'bottled lightning,' plasma-torch technology can do all that and more. It works by passing an electric current through an ionized gas, resulting in what scientists sometimes refer to as a 'fourth state of matter' that often has temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun. Stick virtually any kind of substance in the plasma arc's path and it is irreversibly destroyed, broken down into heavy metals and gases that can be recovered and reused.
And since the process works without releasing contaminants into the atmosphere, plasma-torch technology is catching on across the world, with new plants opening in China, Italy, Hawaii and Japan.
First discovered by German scientists in the 19th century, plasma torches and the searing 5,000-degree-celsius heat they produce were used in the 1960s by NASA to simulate re-entry of spacecraft into Earth's atmosphere. By the 1970s and 80s, scientists started looking into the technology's potential for other sues -- like melting garbage.
Researchers started vitrifying solid waste, melting out liquids and forcing out gases in virtually any kind of material. The intense radiant energy and high temperatures of plasma arcs essentially break down waste on a molecular level, leaving little behind. A 1990 study in Canada found that vitrified waste was 80 percent denser than the original material, more than 90 percent smaller, highly stable and resistant to leaching. Researchers soon envisioned metal tubes with electrodes at either end to ionize gas and create plasma arcs. When inserted into bore holes dug into landfills, the tube systems could literally 'shrink' layers of landfill material down to near nothing.
This is no small deal in the United States, where more than 200 million tons of municipal solid waste are dumped into landfills each year. As availability of land grows more scarce and environmental and health laws governing waste disposal become more stringent, plasma-torch technology could start to look more and more attractive.
So why aren't plasma torches being used in landfills across the country?
For starters, cost is a major issue. At close to $70 per ton of garbage, plasma-torch technology is easily double the price of cheaper methods such as incineration and landfill disposal. But in locales where land is at a premium, including Europe and Japan, plasma torches are being seen as cost-effective for a variety of waste streams.
Japan, where the government is looking to replace community incinerators with alternative technologies, is at the forefront of plasma technology. A new plasma waste plant that handles PCBs recently opened there, and in 2002 Hitachi Metals helped build the country's first plasma plant, which produces eight megawatts of electricity as a byproduct of torching auto waste.
The other drawback to plasma-torch technology is that is uses up almost as much energy as it produce in combustible gases. But Joseph Longo of Startech Environmental Corporation, a U.S.-based plasma torch developer, told Planet Ark that a well-designed system can actually produce three to four times as much energy in carbon gases and 50 percent more energy than it uses in the form of hydrogen gas.
"If the energy in the product gas stream is recovered and converted to electricity with an efficiency factor of at least 25 percent, the total facility can be self sufficient in terms of electricity. If the conversion factor, or the relative proportion of energy out to energy in can be improved for a given application, the system can be a net supplier of electrical energy," reads the website of RCL Plasma, a Canadian company focused on plasma gasification. "In key applications such as the disposal of [municipal solid waste], a plasma gasification system can almost always be capable of being a net supplier (rather than consumer) of electrical power."
Besides the ability to reduce waste to 90 percent less than its previous volume, the capacity to generate its own power -- and potentially produce surplus power that's fed back to the grid -- is enticing waste managers to give plasma technology a closer look.
Presently, the cheapest energy source for getting at hydrogen for use in fuel cells is through fossil fuels such as coal or oil. But that entails all the original environmental problems -- greenhouse gases, air pollution, and toxins -- that gave rise to hydrogen as a desired alternative to fossil fuels in the first place. As wind and solar power become more directly competitve with other energy sources for producing hydrogen, plasma torches might provide an 'in-between,' transitory link in the chain of events leading toward wider adoption of hydrogen.
According to Startech Corp., which has a demonstration plasma torch facility as its Bristol, Conn. headquarters, if the 225 million U.S. car tires disposed of annually were instead zapped by Startech units, enough hydrogen would be produced to supply 500,000 homes with electricity for an entire year.
"Will it significantly meet the needs of the U.S. for hydrogen? It will be one technology of many," said Startech's Longo in Planet Ark.
So plasma torches may turn out to be effective producers of hydrogen. But let's reconsider waste reduction: If plasma can truly obliterate mad cow disease, anthrax, low-level radioactive waste, PCBs and other hazardous materials, are those materials really rendered inert in the glassy rocks that the process produces? And are those rocks safe to be sold for re-use in the construction and abrasives industries, as researchers attest?
Thanks to work performed at Washington's Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Integrated Environmental Technologies, a company based in Richland, answers to such questions are emerging.
Researchers at PNNL and IET, working with the proprietary "Plasma Enhanced Melter" system, found that the obsidian-like rock is very stable, non-leachable and non-toxic. And the Environmental Protection Agency recently backed up that assertion. In a recent report, the EPA concluded that the Melter system exceeded the agency's threshold for destruction of hazardous materials by two orders of magnitude.
In the end, some might knock plasma-torch technology by saying that it's nothing more than a glorified incinerator, albeit a highly efficient one. And start-up costs for many plasma facilities can run into the millions of dollars, making the technology currently cost-effective for only a narrow range of potential uses.
Plus, plasma doesn't necessarily address the core problem of why we're running out of landfill space in the first place -- all of our garbage. In fact, one might argue that by zeroing out our build-up of waste, plasma technology might actually encourage a continuation of our status quo, throwaway mentality.
But I'd wager the advantages of plasma torches will likely outweigh any drawbacks in the long run, especially if our society keeps dealing with only the symptoms (waste) of our lifestyles and not prevention (conservation). Further research and advances will no doubt continue to make plasma-torch technology more cost-effective compared to other disposal options. And one final fact might outweigh many others: it's not as if we have an unlimited amount of land to use for landfills!
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greenTIDE is a weekly commentary on green business news written by Tidepool.org Managing Editor Derek Reiber, derek@ecotrust.org
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