Humans are machines for turning the world into waste—at least that’s how it seems. On average, every single person in the United States produces about 2kg of trash per day, which adds to up three quarters of a ton, per person, each year! What are we to do with all this junk? Recycling is one option, but not everyone does it and there are lots of things (such as electronic circuit boards) made from multiple materials that cannot be easily broken down and turned into new things. That’s why much of our waste goes where it’s always gone, buried beneath the ground. But we’re running out of landfill space too—and that problem is bound to get worse. Another possibility is to incinerate waste, as though it were a fuel, and use it to produce energy, but incinerators are deeply unpopular with local communities because of the air pollution they can produce.
What is Plasma Arc Waste Disposal
Plasma arc recycling doesn’t involve combustion. Instead of simply burning the waste (at a few hundred degrees), the waste is heated to much higher temperatures (thousands of degrees) so it melts and then vaporizes. This is done by an electrical device known as a plasma arc, which is a kind of super-hot “torch” made by passing gas through an electrical spark. Think of the spark you get from the sparking plug in a car: electricity feeds into the plug from the battery, makes a lightning-like spark leap across a small air gap between two contacts, and the spark ignites the fuel that powers your engine. A plasma arc is a much bigger version of the same thing, with a gas (such as oxygen, nitrogen, or argon) blowing through it to create a kind of super-hot plasma torch (like a giant welding torch).
The plasma arc in a waste plant heats the waste to temperatures anywhere from about 1000–15,000°C, but typically in the middle of that range, melting the waste and then turning it into vapor. Simple organic (carbon-based) materials cool back down into relatively clean gases; metals and other inorganic wastes fuse together and cool back into solids. In theory, you end up with two products: syngas (an energy-rich mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) and a kind of rocky solid waste not unlike chunks of broken glass. The syngas can be piped away and burned to make energy (some of which can be used to fuel the plasma arc equipment), while the “vitrified” (glass-like) rocky solid can be used as aggregate (for road building and other construction). In practice, the syngas may be contaminated with toxic gases such as dioxins that have to be scrubbed out and disposed of somehow, while the rocky solid may also contain some contaminated material.
Advantages
Supporters of the technology claim that it’s cleaner and greener than incineration, because waste is “rearranged” into different substances rather than burned to release pollution. Properly designed, a plasma plant theoretically produces no air pollution and no ash or dust; it’s only real waste product is the solid, vitrified aggregate that can be used in construction (APP claim that their version, known as Plasmarok®, is “environmentally inert” and “leach resistant.”) In practice, every kind of waste treatment produces toxic heavy metals and other residues that cannot be disposed of completely. In a plasma plant, they can at least be separated out, melted down, and reused; they’re not simply being blown into the air as incinerator ash or stuffed underground in a landfill and left there to cause problems for future generations.
Unlike virtually any other kind of waste treatment, plasma recycling can cope with virtually any kind of waste, including the most hazardous, high-grade, and hard-to-treat forms (toxic incinerator ash, hazardous medical waste, toxic metals, electronic components, and so on). Where landfilling squanders valuable material and—at best—produces small amounts of methane energy, plasma recycling produces much more energy with no land-take. Indeed, some plasma recycling companies have even proposed “mining” existing landfills to use as raw fuels for plasma plants; that raises the prospect that we could eventually be able to clean up the toxic legacy of decades of landfill. Although plasma plants use a significant amount of energy, roughly two thirds of what they make is fed into the grid, which makes them, overall, carbon negative (they have an overall benefit where global warming is concerned). A typical plant would produce enough electricity to power up to 10,000 homes and enough waste steam, as a byproduct, to heat or provide hot water to maybe 500-1000. It’s important to remember that plasma plants produce syngas as a fuel, which can either be burned to make energy in a conventional power plant or separated into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, with the hydrogen collected and stored for use in fuel-cell cars.
Disadvantages
Opponents of the technology are concerned that it’s largely untried and its drawbacks aren’t yet known. No-one really knows whether it’s safe or whether it’s more economic than other forms of waste treatment. One concern is that it’s simply a new way of dressing up something that is little better than incineration. Although the waste isn’t burned, it is heated and some harmful products (including heavy metals and toxic dioxins) are left over at the end of the process. The solid aggregate waste has been billed as a useful construction material, but no-one can yet be certain precisely what it would contain, how safe it would prove, or whether it could indeed release toxic chemicals into the environment over time.
One argument against conventional incinerators is that they undermine drives to reduce and recycle waste. If commercially operated incinerators need (and indeed profit from) steady supplies of waste, what is the incentive to reduce packaging in grocery stores and all the other things we routinely send to the trash?
Source: https://www.explainthatstuff.com/plasma-arc-recycling.html
My thoughts on that
The first paragraph I believe says it all. We need a sustainable method of treating our waste. The three R’s, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, while helpful, do not solve the problem, they only postpone it for a later date. An ideal scenario would be one that, every single waste we produce gets treated and doesn’t end up polluting the environment. Plasma Arc Waste Disposal is the most advanced waste management technology out there. The simple fact that it can “burn” any kind of waste creates some sort of panacea. Addressing the disadvantages, I think of the following: We cannot get rid of toxic chemicals entirely. The only question is if the technology we use to treat them is sustainable. In my opinion, Plasma Arc Waste Disposal is the only sustainable method of treating waste. If implemented properly, it can not only eliminate landfills need, it can actually use the waste already in the landfills as fuel. This is also known as landfill mining, and Plasma Arc Waste Disposal takes it to another level. As for the economic cost, it really doesn’t matter how much you have to pay in order to create a sustainable future. The change must happen now and fast.