SKIRMISHER

Your trash today may be used to pave roads and power the world tomorrow.

St. Lucie Country in Florida is excited to have a nice friend — a company called Geoplasma — which is willing to lavish $425 million of cold hard cash on building a facility that will use plasma arcs to vaporize trash (the real ones, and sadly not necessarily those hiphop rappers) into gas and rock-like material.

“The 100,000-square-foot plant, slated to be operational in two years, is expected to vaporize 3,000 tons of garbage a day. County officials estimate their entire landfill — 4.3 million tons of trash collected since 1978 — will be gone in 18 years.

Synthetic, combustible gas produced in the process will be used to run turbines to create about 120 megawatts of electricity that will be sold back to the grid. The facility will operate on about a third of the power it generates, free from outside electricity.

About 80,000 pounds of steam per day will be sold to a neighboring Tropicana Products Inc. facility to power the juice plant’s turbines.

Sludge from the county’s wastewater treatment plant will be vaporized, and a material created from melted organic matter — up to 600 tons a day — will be hardened into slag, and sold for use in road and construction projects.”

If this kind of facility becomes very popular, it’s interesting to hear local communities in the future actually beg their neighbors for “more of those filthy, rotting garbage, please.” It will be music to the absurdist’s ears.
via USATODAY

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