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One Man's Trash is Another Man's Vaporized Block of Nothingness
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Monday, September 11, 2006
5:54:00 PM EDT
Hearing Yellow -- Petra Haden and Bill Frisell
Oooh. Excuse me for getting all geeky here, but this is a bit of technology I've been waiting to show up here in the US:
A Florida county has grand plans to ditch its dump, generate electricity and help build roads -- all by vaporizing garbage at temperatures hotter than parts of 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. Supporters say the process is cleaner than traditional trash incineration, though skeptics question whether the technology can meet the lofty expectations.
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.
That's awesome. All that trash, turned into glassy rock through the mighty power of plasma. If it works. I heard about this technology a number of years ago, and wondered if it would ever actually work. Apparently it works well enough for someone to make an investment in it.
Ironically, the biggest losers in a plant like this will be future archeologists: Much of what we know about many cultures around the world is from "middens," which is to say, the refuse heaps those cultures left behind. If we vaporize all our trash, we vaporize what future civilizations can learn about our day-to-day lives. But maybe they'll have access to the Internet archives in the far future, and they'll be able to read all our blogs instead. Because we know how representative blogs are to our common culture.
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5:54:00 PM EDT
Hearing Yellow -- Petra Haden and Bill Frisell
One Man's Trash is Another Man's Vaporized Block of Nothingness
Oooh. Excuse me for getting all geeky here, but this is a bit of technology I've been waiting to show up here in the US:
A Florida county has grand plans to ditch its dump, generate electricity and help build roads -- all by vaporizing garbage at temperatures hotter than parts of 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. Supporters say the process is cleaner than traditional trash incineration, though skeptics question whether the technology can meet the lofty expectations.
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.
That's awesome. All that trash, turned into glassy rock through the mighty power of plasma. If it works. I heard about this technology a number of years ago, and wondered if it would ever actually work. Apparently it works well enough for someone to make an investment in it.
Ironically, the biggest losers in a plant like this will be future archeologists: Much of what we know about many cultures around the world is from "middens," which is to say, the refuse heaps those cultures left behind. If we vaporize all our trash, we vaporize what future civilizations can learn about our day-to-day lives. But maybe they'll have access to the Internet archives in the far future, and they'll be able to read all our blogs instead. Because we know how representative blogs are to our common culture.
Written by johnmscalzi Blog about this entry |
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This entry has 7 comments: (Add your own)
-
God forbid! Not only do we vaporize our garbage and midden piles for future generations, but we vaporize our golf courses as well! Now what do we do with all that rock? Hit golf balls off of them?
Jude
http://journals.aol.com/jmorancoyle/MyWay -
I always chuckled at the thought that in a few thousand years, future archaelogists will just assume that the golden arches was our religious symbol: we build them everywhere and populations grew around them.
Makes you wonder how wrong we are about past civilizations based on dumpster diving their remains. -
If we burn all the garbage to make electricity, what we in Wisconsin going to use to build landfills so that we can have "ski hills?"
-Dan
http://journals.aol.com/dpoem/TheWisdomofaDistractedMind/ -
They'll never find Jimmy Hoffa now.
9/13/06 7:31 AM
http://www.amazon.com/Motel-M
In it, archeologists from the future stumble upon a buried tacky roadside motel and think it's a tomb of some sort. It's absolutely hillarious.
-Dan
http://journals.aol.com/dpoem