From the highway, one
of the biggest landfills in the US doesn’t look at all like a dump.
It’s more like a misplaced mesa. Only when you drive closer to the
center of operations at the 700-acre Columbia Ridge Landfill in
Arlington, Oregon, does the function of this place become clear. Some
35,000 tons of mostly household trash arrive here weekly by train from
Seattle and by truck from Portland.
Dump trucks inch up the gravel road to the top of the heap, where
they tip their cargo of dirty diapers, discarded furniture, lemon rinds,
spent lightbulbs, Styrofoam peanuts, and all the rest onto a carefully
flattened blanket of dirt. At night, more dump trucks spread another
layer of dirt over the day’s deposits, preventing trash from escaping on
the breeze.
But as of November, not all the trash arriving at Columbia Ridge has
ended up buried. On the southwest side of the landfill, bus-sized
containers of gas connect to ribbons of piping, which run into a
building that looks like an airplane hangar with a loading dock. Here,
dump trucks also offload refuse. This trash, however, is destined for a
special kind of treatment—one that could redefine how we think about
trash.
In an era when it’s getting more and more confusing to determine
where to toss your paper coffee cup—compost? recycle? trash? arrrgh!—and
when no one seems to have a viable solution to the problem of
humanity’s ever-expanding rubbish pile, this plant represents a step
toward radical simplification. It uses plasma gasification, a technology
that turns trash into a fuel without producing emissions. In other
words: a guilt-free solution to our waste problems. 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. (Hydrogen, for
example, is used to make ammonia and fertilizers.)
Here’s how it works: The household waste delivered into this hangar
will get shredded, then travel via conveyer to the top of a large tank.
From there it falls into a furnace that’s heated to 1,500 degrees
Fahrenheit and mixes with oxygen and steam. The resulting chemical
reaction vaporizes 75 to 85 percent of the waste, transforming it into a
blend of gases known as syngas (so called because they can be used to
create synthetic natural gas). The syngas is piped out of the system and
segregated. The remaining substances, still chemically intact, descend
into a second vessel that’s roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.
This cauldron makes the one above sound lukewarm by comparison.
Inside, two electrodes aimed toward the middle of the vessel create an
electric arc that, at 18,000 degrees, is almost as hot as lightning.
This intense, sustained energy becomes so hot that it transforms
materials into their constituent atomic elements. The reactions take
place at more than 2,700 degrees, which means this isn’t
incineration—this is emission-free molecular deconstruction. (The small
amount of waste material that survives falls to the bottom of the
chamber, where it’s trapped in molten glass that later hardens into
inert blocks.)
The seemingly sci-fi transformation occurs because the trash is
blasted apart by plasma—the forgotten-stepsister state of matter. Plasma
is like gas in that you can’t grip or pour it. But because extreme heat
ionizes some atoms (adding or subtracting electrons), causing
conductivity, it behaves in ways that are distinct from gas.
Dozens of firms are racing to find the right formula to use plasma to
blast garbage into gas. Yet despite incremental improvements in the
technology, plasma gasification has proved too energy- and
capital-intensive for real-world use on everyday trash. If the value of
the syngas produced doesn’t offset the amount of energy required to
power the furnaces and melt the trash, what’s the point?
Now S4 cofounder Jeff Surma may have finally solved that problem.
(S4, by the way, refers to the fourth state of matter: plasma.) The
52-year-old chemical engineer is convinced that he can transform garbage
from something we toss into something we value—and get it to work on a
vast scale. He has already made enough advances with the technology to
attract millions of dollars in backing from Waste Management, the $12.5
billion trash hauling, recycling, and disposal behemoth, which owns the
landfill here in Arlington.
Still, it’s a long shot. The US generates about 250 million tons of
trash a year. Even with recycling and composting facilities tackling an
estimated 85 million tons of refuse per year, it would take thousands of
new plants much bigger than this one (and another S4 facility being
constructed in McCarran, Nevada) to handle the nation’s municipal trash
output. That’s a lot of plasma.
Photo: Kevin Van Aelst
On a summer afternoon, Surma steps out of his
Mercury Mariner, replaces tasselled loafers with work boots, and dons a
yellow hard hat. He has a runner’s physique and a shock of white hair,
and wears wraparound sunglasses. Today he’s guiding potential customers
from the chemical industry around the Arlington plant, explaining how it
all works. Later he confides: “If we’re still here in two years,
telling you what we plan to be doing, you can come back and call bullshit on us.”
Here’s a short history of how Surma’s trash blaster
came to be: Fresh out of graduate school at Montana State University in
1985, he was hired by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a research
facility in Richland, Washington. He was there to work on an especially
hideous mess: the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, just down the road.
Beginning with the Manhattan Project, the US government cooked most of
the plutonium for America’s nuclear weapons arsenal at Hanford. With its
nine nuclear reactors, giant plutonium processing plants, and buried
tanks of radioactive sludge, the site has earned the dubious distinction
of being one of the most contaminated nuclear waste sites in the
Western Hemisphere.
Surma’s first project was to work on so-called joule-heated melters,
an experimental method for processing nuclear waste. “We basically fed
this muddy slurry into a chamber that was heated with coils,” he says,
“almost like the coils on an electric stovetop.” This chemical process,
known as vitrification, immobilizes radioactive materials in an inert
form of glass. By and large, the system worked; the team was able to
convert waste into more than 30 four-foot-tall canisters of vitrified
glass.
But that pricey and delicate process made sense for only the worst
materials on the site. Hanford also has huge quantities of more
heterogeneous trash, much of which contains low-level radioactivity. “It
couldn’t go to a landfill,” Surma says, but it wasn’t suited to
vitrification, either.
Surma went prowling through the literature for other waste-treatment
techniques and was soon reading up on tech known as the plasma torch. In
the 1960s, scientists at NASA wanted to learn more about the effect of
extreme heat on manned spacecraft reentering the atmosphere. They
developed plasma torches to mimic those conditions.
Meanwhile, Surma learned, the practice of using plasma for processing
waste had been around for decades, primarily in the metal and chemical
industries. Oil refineries, for instance, spend $2,000 a ton to dispose
of their toxic sludge with plasma gasification. But few people ever gave
the technology much serious consideration for treating everyday garbage
because of the high energy costs and because the heterogeneity of
municipal solid waste makes it that much harder to efficiently untangle.
Jeff Surma wants to transform garbage from something we toss into something we value.
And then there’s the problem of the toxins in heavy metals—materials
from busted televisions, microwave ovens, dead batteries, broken
thermometers, old paints—which aren’t broken down by plasma. If you
don’t want hazardous leftovers making their way into, say, the water
supply, you have to find a way to safely sequester the stuff. Those
especially nasty substances, of course, were Surma’s specialty.
Around the same time that Surma was looking into all this, a
physicist at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center named Dan Cohn was
searching for plasma technology’s possible environmental applications.
He placed a call to Pacific Northwest, asking if anyone at the lab was
doing plasma research, and he was connected with Surma. Before long they
were brainstorming how to take the technology beyond merely disposing
of specialized toxic waste: They wanted to go after the billions of tons
of common household trash.
The next step was to pull in a retired engineer from GE named Charles
Titus. He was an expert in high-voltage engineering and had become
convinced that metal torches, which tend to get damaged by the very heat
they deliver, were the wrong technology. It would be better to create
plasma with an electric arc strung between two graphite electrodes.
(Titus died in 2007.)
But the trio also knew that if they were going to aim for the massive
market in municipal solid waste, they needed a clean system with
essentially no byproducts. Otherwise, their technology would look like
incineration in disguise. One evening in 1994, over a meat-lover’s pizza
and another round of Sam Adams at a Bertucci’s restaurant near MIT,
Surma wondered aloud about combining the plasma attack with the
vitrification technology he’d mastered at Hanford to handle the nasty
leftovers. The concept was captivating, but they would have to find a
way to run that kind of machinery without also needing a dedicated
hydroelectric dam to power it.
To combine the vitrification and plasma-zapping processes in the same
chamber, they needed to keep the molten glass at the bottom of the
vessel from cooling down; continuously having to reheat it would
interrupt key chemical reactions and could quickly lead to exorbitant
energy costs.
Keep it hot. Sounds straightforward, but it isn’t. While the molten
soup needs alternating current to maintain steady temperature, the
electric arc for the plasma runs on direct current. Titus, the
electricity guru, said he could rig the AC/DC combo, and that evening
they quickly sketched out details for a system that would enable DC and
AC to cohabitate within a plasma gasification furnace jacked up with a
melter. This tandem approach, the men realized, promised to provide just
enough energy to sustain the plasma and atomize trash, while keeping
the glass in a molten state. “But no more energy than that!” Surma says.
The next day they wrote up the details in an invention disclosure, a
kind of shortcut for protecting an idea in advance of filing a full
patent.
Within a few months, the three scientists felt ready to launch a
company. Cohn knew a guy who had made a killing selling his
frozen-dinner company to ConAgra and was looking to invest in promising
technologies. So one afternoon in 1994, in a dimly lit room with
mahogany walls at Manhattan’s Chemists’ Club, they presented the melter
idea to the frozen-dinner guy, who had brought along a venture
capitalist friend to offer advice. Surma, Cohn, and Titus got the money,
as well as a complementary booklet of coupons for chicken potpies.
How to
Blast Trash
The plasma-enhanced melter now operating in Oregon breaks down
everyday garbage into its constituent atomic elements. Here’s how it
works.
Illustration: James Provost
1/ Gasification
A conveyer belt delivers shredded trash into a chamber, where it’s
mixed with oxygen and steam heated to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. This
process, called gasification, transforms about 80 percent of the waste
into a mixture of gases that are piped out of the system.
2/ Plasma Blasting
Material that doesn’t succumb to the initial heat enters a specially
insulated cauldron. An 18,000-degree electric arc that runs between two
electrodes creates a plasma zone in the center of the container. Exposed
to this intense heat, almost all the remaining trash gets blasted into
its constituent atomic elements. Again, the resulting gases are piped
out and sequestered.
3/ Hazmat Capture
At the bottom of the cauldron sits a joule-heated melter, which is
like coils on an electric stove and maintains a molten glass bath that
traps any hazardous material left over from the plasma process.
4/ Recycling
Swirling in a taffy-like ooze, the molten glass is drawn out of the
system. Now inert, it can be converted into low-value materials such as
road aggregate. Metals are captured at this point, too, and later
recycled into steel.
5/ Fuel Capture
The sequestered gases, known as syngas—mostly carbon monoxide and
hydrogen—are cleaned and can be sold and converted to fuels like diesel
or ethanol to produce electricity onsite or elsewhere.
They called their company Integrated Environmental
Technologies (eventually InEnTec), and in 1995 Surma took a leave of
absence from Pacific Northwest to run it. It was slow going at first.
Surma and his team of three engineers didn’t finish the prototype melter
until 1997. They sold their first commercial units, geared specifically
for hazardous waste, in 1999. Early customers included Boeing and
Kawasaki, which produce heaps of hazardous waste and have to pay dearly
to deal with it. Manufacturers save big money when they don’t have to
contract with someone else to dispose of their waste, and gleaning
useful materials or gases out of a treatment process only adds to
overall savings.
But when InEnTec tried to venture into markets beyond the
manufacturing and chemical industries, things always went wrong. Surma
sold a unit to a company in Hawaii that used it to process medical
waste, but that firm ended up folding. Next, he tried to set up a
medical waste processing operation in northern California, this time to
be run by InEnTec itself. But a group of impassioned citizens stepped in
to oppose the project. They didn’t—or refused to—understand the science
of plasma gasification and the absence of emissions. All they heard was
“medical waste treatment plant” (and some version of “right down the
street”). After an 18-month struggle, Surma jettisoned the project in
2007. It was a moment of truth. He realized that the business had
somehow drifted from the founders’ original vision. “It was always our
intent, from the very first patent, to go after the municipal solid
waste stream,” he says. “But customer pull drew us into hazardous- and
medical-waste treatment.”
Surma decided to retrench—to get back to the goal of processing what
he calls the granddaddy of waste streams. Together with InEnTec’s chief
engineer, Jim Batdorf, he spent three days planted in front of a
whiteboard, trying to come up with ways to make it more economically
feasible to use the melter on household garbage in all its heterogeneous
glory.
The breakthrough alteration they came up with was to stack a
conventional gasifier atop the plasma-enhanced melter. The trash
undergoes heating and treatment by way of this preliminary gasifier,
then moves into the chamber with the plasma zapper and vitrification.
It’s like partly defrosting a turkey before putting it in the oven. This
strategy improves efficiency because it takes less energy for the
plasma to blast materials that have already undergone some heating. The
leftovers, meanwhile, drop down into the molten soup, which flows in a
slow, taffy-like ooze of glass and liquefied metal out the bottom of the
system. At the same time, syngas piped out of the plant can be burned
as fuel to, in theory, supply all of the power needed to run the melter
itself.
The actual plant built by S4—a wholly owned subsidiary of InEnTec—is
still so new that it remains to be seen whether the quality and quantity
of Surma’s syngas matches the predictions and test data gathered so
far. “The goal is to take waste and produce a product that is used for
energy or for some other process,” says Tom Reardon, a vice president
with the waste consultancy Gershman, Brickner & Bratton. “They’ve
proven they can produce a syngas. But from it, can they produce the fuel
they’re supposed to?”
“The easy answer used to be: Store it in a can, put it in a truck, and then send it to a big hole in the ground.”
What Surma didn’t know back when InEnTec was
retooling for municipal trash was that, starting in 2005, executives at
Waste Management had quietly dispatched a team of experts and
consultants to study plasma gasification. If it looked like a worthy
technology, they would invest. After a review that lasted more than two
years, they determined that InEnTec was one of the few firms in the
world whose technology looked viable. In 2008, Surma found himself on a
flight to Houston to give Waste Management executives a presentation
about his plasma-enhanced melter.
The company’s executives know better than most that we can chuck
trash in landfills for only so long. “The easy answer used to be: Store
it in a can, put it in a truck, and then send it to a big hole in the
ground,” says Carl Rush, a senior vice president at Waste Management.
“We’re moving away from that as a society.” Why? People don’t like it,
it’s becoming costlier to transport and bury garbage, and—even in the
spacious American West—landfills are gradually butting up against more
backyards and inching their way toward local water tables.
Trash-to-fuel technology has in fact been around since the 1970s and
involves burning waste to generate electricity. But that method, no
matter how fancy your emissions scrubbers, invariably produces a stew of
byproducts that need to be disposed of. Consequently,
environmentalists—and some in the industry itself—have remained
skeptical of trash-to-fuel. Nevertheless, Rush and his team suspected
that entrepreneurs might have cracked the problem and began searching
for experimental technologies to invest in. Among the more than two
dozen companies Waste Management has recently added to its portfolio are
a startup with a specialized method for producing compost, a firm that
uses gasification to turn biomass into synthetic gas, and a company that
converts mixed and contaminated waste plastic into synthetic crude oil.
Not all of these startups will make it, and it’s possible that most
won’t. But Waste Management bosses hope they will help accelerate the
transition to an era in which the very idea of garbage itself is
garbage—and they want to be positioned to profit when that time comes. The INENTEC Hydrocarbon Conversion Test Facility is
located next door to Richland’s tiny airport. Inside the cavernous
building stands the first prototype of the plasma- enhanced melter,
which is less than a third the size of the unit 85 miles away in
Arlington. This is where Surma and his team refine and tune the blasting
process in an ongoing series of upgrade experiments, melting materials
from everyday trash to asbestos, PCBs, hazardous chemical sludge, and
discarded electronic equipment. Data gleaned here will help with tweaks
at the plant in Arlington and inform the design and operation of S4’s
next commercial melters.
Today they’re testing a chemical called toluene, one of the most
stable organic compounds there is. That makes it a great substance for
assessing the melter’s proficiency at busting things apart, since being
chemically stable means toluene is not easily changed or altered without
some kind of big input, such as a blast of superhigh heat.
Staring through a circular window into the furnace, I see the
cherry-red glow of the plasma. It looks like a cross between lava and a
supernova. (If you could somehow stick your arm in there, it would be
instantly vaporized.)
Back in Arlington, I catch up with Waste Management’s point person
for S4, Joe Vaillancourt. After a tour of the gasification plant, he
sits on a desk in the operations room. Plastic still covers the gray
carpet, but flatscreen monitors are aglow. “This plant will provide the
data to quiet the naysayers,” Vaillancourt says. Once it’s running at
full capacity, it will process 25 tons of waste a day.
He stares out the window for a moment, past the S4 facility to the
man-made mountain of garbage behind it. Then he nods toward the
consoles, where technicians will monitor the machines and chemical brew
that will blast tomorrow’s trash to smithereens. “If you don’t want
landfills, how could you not want this?” he asks. Contributing editor David Wolman (david@david-wolman.com) is the author of The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers—and the Coming Cashless Society. Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.
They called their company Integrated Environmental
Technologies (eventually InEnTec), and in 1995 Surma took a leave of
absence from Pacific Northwest to run it. It was slow going at first.
Surma and his team of three engineers didn’t finish the prototype melter
until 1997. They sold their first commercial units, geared specifically
for hazardous waste, in 1999. Early customers included Boeing and
Kawasaki, which produce heaps of hazardous waste and have to pay dearly
to deal with it. Manufacturers save big money when they don’t have to
contract with someone else to dispose of their waste, and gleaning
useful materials or gases out of a treatment process only adds to
overall savings.