Energy Startup Wants To Deal With Trash By Vaporizing It
Waste management has become a huge headache for countries all around the world. As the world population rises, this problem will only become more prevalent. More than 2 billion tons of waste is produced each year in the world and only a fraction of it gets recycled.
The rest clogs up our lands, oceans and rivers and even the air. As a result, the activities of one species on the planet, is harming all other species. Slowly but surely, the Earth is becoming a more inhabitable planet even though we do not notice it in an obvious manner.
Thankfully recycling technologies are getting advanced and more people are becoming aware about waste management. If we act now, we can probably deal judiciously with all the waste that we produce, within a decade.
One such effort is currently being made by a startup called Sierra Energy. The tech that they have built literally vaporizes trash, which if proven to be successful at scale, could end up being the holy grail of waste management.
Vaporize It
A huge problem with trash is that it occupies space (like any other matter) and causes pollution (as a result of methane emmissions). Therefore if we could vaporize the trash, a huge problem could be solved as the resultant gas would be easier to handle.
Sierra Energy's FastOx technology does exactly that. Trash is first placed in a modified blast furnace and then pure oxygen and steam is injected into it. This rapid injection causes the temperature of the furnace to rise to 2204 degrees Celsius (4000 degrees Fahrenheit).
This causes 90% of the waste to be converted into syngas, which is a renewable fuel that can be used to produce electricity, fertilizer, hydrogen, ethanol and more. The rest of the 10% of the waste (which mostly contains metals) is liquified and can be used for other purposes.
The best part about this process is that it doesn't produce any toxic byproducts or emmissions while at the same time producing renewable fuel. It also doesn't require any external energy. The costs included to run this are low as well and therefore can be used by a number of concerned parties.
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This will also only continue to become a bigger issue as the population increases. There is energy that can be converted into another form in almost anything and its good to see startups taking the initiative.
Digging a hole in the ground and burying it or just setting it on fire shouldn't be the norm for the 21st Century.
Yeah, exactly. We have highly advanced technologies for so many things and it only makes sense to apply it to waste management as well.
Burning waste is a better solution than just dumping it to a landfill, but if the waste burning isn't used to produce electricity/heat/something else, like syngas in this example, it's lost potential.
However I do think we should try to recycle as much of the waste as possible, like most of the plastics would could be recycled and burning the plastic waste is the non-ideal solution.
The food waste would also be most efficient when handled in another way, as especially wet waste will cause issues in waste incernation. Locally we're having a waste facility which produces biogas and soil from the food waste brought there. The biogas is then used for different things, as a fuel for gas-powered cars.
Agreed. Plastic should be recycled as much as possible and only waste that is difficult to deal with could be vaporized.
Yes bro now a days too much pollution.