Medusa verses Garbage
Plasma arc technology turns garbage to stone
Brendan Christopher Cathcart, Staff
“Atlas,” wrote Ovid in Book IV of his Metamorphoses, “was the lord of Earth’s furthest shores, and of the sea . . . . In his meadows strayed a thousand flocks, all his, and as many herds of cattle; and he had a tree on which shining leaves of glittering gold covered golden boughs and golden fruit.” It was a perfect, peaceful kingdom until the day Perseus, the son of Jupiter, showed up asking for shelter and hospitality. Years earlier, the fates had warned Atlas that one day the spoils of his lands would be robbed by “a son of Jupiter,” so he put up a fight and told Perseus to get lost. Perseus, realizing he didn’t stand a chance against the hulking giant, “produced in his left hand the horrid head of Medusa. Atlas was changed into a mountain as huge as the giant he had been.”
Earlier this year I had the “opportunity” to “visit” (quotation marks indicative of euphemism) the Brady Road Landfill, situated just off the Perimeter Highway on the southern outskirts of Winnipeg. Even before entering the gate an unfathomable smell had begun penetrating the air-filter defences of our vehicle, but this was nothing compared to what was ahead. We waited in line behind many, many trucks full of everything: bricks, drywall, mattresses, stoves, fridges, wood, toys, bikes, clothes, desks, couches, televisions — the entire contents of garage sales plus whatever else doesn’t make it into garage sales. When it was our turn to enter the site we paid $4, which gave us the right to drive to a designated spot in the 790-hectare space, dump 1,500 lbs. of stuff we had no use for because it was old or broken or we just didn’t want it anymore, and then turn our carefree backs and drive away. Garbage gone.
But not really. Now it was just somewhere other than at our house, added to a massive 5-million-ton pile of waste that could easily be mistaken for the ruins of an entire civilization.
For obvious reasons, the Brady Landfill doesn’t fit the description of Atlas’s paradise, but that’s not the point of the Medusa reference. Love them or hate them, landfills are already there and they are full of materials that have been taken out of the earth and shaped into all sorts of different configurations to fit any need we’ve been able to think of. Now that these materials seem to no longer serve our needs, the issue is what to do with them. Geoplasma, a company based in the U.S., recently began construction on a 100,000-square-foot. facility in St. Lucie, Fla. that it claims provides the best answer to that question.
Using technology developed 40 years earlier by scientists at NASA who needed to test their shuttles against temperatures experienced upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, Geoplasma uses plasma arc technology to vaporize waste materials such as municipal garbage, tires, and raw sewage, transforming them into semi-usable byproducts. Geoplasma bare-minimally explains the process on their website: “Air and electricity are used in the plasma system to create a plasma arc that reaches temperatures of approximately 5,500 C. This intense heat results in a gasification of the waste releasing the BTUs (British Thermal Units — a heat energy value) contained in the waste materials. At this point, the gasified waste is known as Syngas. Syngas is a mix of mainly hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide with a heating value of 150-200BTU/scf gas and can be used in gas turbines, similar to natural gas. The other byproduct produced at this stage is a hard, obsidian-like stone that can be used as aggregate or shaped into paving bricks or other construction materials. Inorganic molten metals are also discharged, collected, and sold as scrap metal.”
Wikipedia.com offers a slightly more detailed explanation of what goes on inside the system once the 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit marker is reached. “Inert gas or air under pressure is passed through the arc into a sealed container of waste material . . . . At these temperatures most types of waste are broken down into basic elemental components in a gaseous form, and complex molecules are atomized — separated into individual atoms . . . the feed system is complemented by a gaseous removal system, and later a solid removal system.”
The facility in St. Lucie is expected to be able to process 3,000 tons per day, producing 600 tons per day of the rock-like material. In a USA Today article from Sept. 9, 2006 entitled “Florida County Plans to Vaporize Landfill Trash,” Lynne Sladky cites St. Lucie County officials estimating that, “their entire landfill — 4.3 million tons of trash collected since 1978 — will be gone in 18 years.”
The Syngas produced by the system goes directly into a gas turbine engine that powers the system itself, but also produces large amounts of energy that gets injected into the local energy grid. Just how much energy is needed to power such a system? Since Geoplasma doesn’t divulge such specific details on its website, C. Scott Miller, president of the Miller DeWulf Corporation in California, posed this exact question to Hilburn Hillestad, president of Geoplasma, and posted the response on his blog (Bioconversion.blogspot.com). “The facility will receive its energy from its total output. For St. Lucie, it is expected that the 3,000 tons of MSW processed per day will create 160 megawatts of energy per hour. [Forty] megawatts will be used to power the facility and the remaining 120 megawatts will be sold to an Electric Utility.”
Since what goes in one end is something we generally consider to be garbage, the fact that what comes out the other end is useable seems nothing less than miraculous. “It sounds like magic,” said Shirley Thompson, a researcher at the Natural Resources Institute based at the University of Manitoba. Thompson is skeptical about the technology for two reasons: she’d never heard of it, and also, it sounds like an inefficient use of our waste. Landfills produce enormous amounts of methane that can be captured and used if proper capture systems were to be put in place. Also, landfills are full of various metals and other materials that could be mined, recycled, and then reused.
Randall McQuaker, executive director of Resource Conservation Manitoba, shared some of the same concerns. “The technical fix to the waste problem is something to worry about,” he said. “People are always trying to figure out ways of making our garbage go away, but here isn’t any magic place called ‘away,’ there’s just the Earth and we depend on it for the water that we need and the food that we need.” Turning potentially reusable materials into a type of rock that so far only has use-value for roads and building materials is not necessarily the best decision.
Thompson and McQuaker both agree that the one major overarching problem with a waste-to-energy system like Geoplasma’s is that it doesn’t encourage societies to lower consumption rates or to create better, more sustainable production methods. On the contrary there is a concern that a system like Geoplasma’s will actually encourage consumption. “When you make these garbage feedstock systems,” said McQuaker, “then you’re creating a demand for garbage.” Such a claim might sound absurd and unrealistic, but according to Sladky’s article, Hilburn Hillestad has said of the plasma arc waste disposal system: “This is sustainability in its truest and finest form.” Geoplasma is not a disinterested humanitarian organization that seeks simply to make the earth a cleaner place. It is a company that seeks to stay in business as long as possible, which of course is a completely normal aspiration for any business. The issue is that a company like this can only keep running if people keep producing garbage, and a good way to encourage such behaviour is by conceptualizing garbage as a renewable energy resource.
Although Geoplasma can make enormous stinking landfills disappear, the technology will not help to curb production and consumption behaviors responsible for filling them in the first place. What could result is an endless cycle of potentially reusable materials being atomized out of their form into essentially unusable mountains of rock. In St. Lucie, after 18 years of processing both the garbage already in the landfills as well as the stuff being trucked in daily, there will be 3,942,000 tonnes of this rock produced. That’s only from one single landfill. The Brady Landfill is already bigger than the one in St. Lucie, and this is just one out of 314 active landfills in Manitoba alone. If every landfill in the world used plasma arc technology to dispose of their waste, the result would eventually be full-scale, man-made mountain ranges spanning the globe. This would truly be the Sons of Jupiter unwisely raising the head of the Medusa in defense, turning the living, breathing Atlas, into a mountain of stone.
