king of rats

poptech:

High-powered plasma turns garbage into gas

Recycling is all well and good.But it hardly addresses the real problem we have with our household waste: We throw two-thirds of it in landfills while somehow managing to feel virtuous that we put last night’s empty wine bottle in the recycling bin. Surely we could do better, environmentally and economically.

There is, in fact, value in trash—if you can unlock it. That’s what this facility in northern Oregon is designed to do. Run by a startup called S4 Energy Solutions, it’s the first commercial plant in the US to use plasma gasification to convert municipal household garbage into gas products like hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which can in turn be burned as fuel or sold to industry for other applications.