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One way to make unknown waste mixtures safe: * Burn it hot. * Take the exhaust from the burnt waste and fractionally distill it to extract the Nitrogen, CO2,
by londons_explore 3y ago
One way to make unknown waste mixtures safe:
* Burn it hot.
* Take the exhaust from the burnt waste and fractionally distill it to extract the Nitrogen, CO2, water and other safe gasses.
* Take the ash and extract things that are worth money (metals), then vitrify the rest (turn it into glass)
* Take everything else and stick it back into the input, letting it go round again and becoming something safe this time.
1 ton of household waste probably only makes 5kg of vitrified glass - turns out nearly everything in your house is carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.
I suspect the energy in all the waste makes this process "free" from an energy standpoint. But obviously the capital cost of a plant big enough for the worlds waste is huge, and unless laws are written to ban landfills and regular incineration, it would never make financial sense.
- invernomut0 3y agoYou're forgetting dioxins and other pollutants resulting from burning various materials, especially plastic.
- pwarner 3y agoBurning above 1000°C supposedly destroys the dioxins. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dioxins-and-their-effects-on-human-health https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dioxins-and...
- londons_explore 3y agoBy having a 'loop' in the process, anything that is incompletely burned and results in dioxins (and anything with a boiling point under ~1500C, which cannot be vitrified) will end up not passing the fractional distillation stage and will be put back into the start of the process to have a 2nd go at breaking down.
- nerdponx 3y agoNew York City had a pilot plasma gasification program in the early 2010s, but I never heard anything about it after 2015 or so and I can't find any updated information about it. I guess the project folded for one reason or another.