Monday September 11, 2006

Florida county plans to vaporize landfill trash

peakoil.com -> usatoday.com :

A Florida county has grand plans to ditch its dump, generate electricity and help build roads - all by vaporizing garbage at temperatures hotter than the sun. The $425 million facility expected to be built in St. Lucie County will use lightning-like plasma arcs to turn trash into gas and rock-like material. It will be the first such plant in the nation operating on such a massive scale and the largest in the world. Only two similar facilities are operating in the world - both in Japan - but are gasifying garbage on a much smaller scale.

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.

No byproduct will go unused, according to Geoplasma, the Atlanta-based company building and paying for the plant. 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. 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.

(2006-09-11 08:37:41 SGT) [Env] Permalink

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