Near future
Contact us
  • Home
  • Tech
  • Health
  • Environment
  • Architecture
  • energia
  • Transportation
  • Spazio
  • AI
  • concepts
  • Gadgets
  • Italy Next
  • H+
June 24 2022

Coronavirus / Russia-Ukraine

Near future

News to understand, anticipate, improve the future.

No Result
View All Result

News to understand, anticipate, improve the future.

Read in:  Chinese (Simplified)EnglishFrenchGermanItalianJapanesePortugueseRussianSpanish

Bill Gates finances the startup that wants to vaporize waste

Vaporizing waste does not create methane as in landfills, but reusable carbon monoxide and hydrogen. And unlike an incinerator, it has no emissions.

Gianluca Ricciodi Gianluca Riccio
in Environment, Technology
Share29Pin10Tweet18SendShare5ShareShare4
Spray waste
July 31 2019
⚪ Reads in 3 minutes
A A

When waste at the end of a journey is no longer recycled and ends up in landfills, it doesn't just steal space. An ecological ordeal begins, such as those we observe in Taverna del Re, one of the landfills in southern Italy, or the many in difficulty around Rome.

Landfill waste, unless stringent treatments and in any case never completely inert, are a great source of methane, the greenhouse gas 86 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. The exponential growth of landfills (just outside New Delhi there is literally a mountain of waste more than 60 meters high, and laconically renamed “Everest”) makes things worse.

A startup plans to eliminatepollution vaporizing waste to transform it into fuel and clean energy. Sierra Energy, this is his name, raised 33 million dollars from the BEV, Breakthrough Energy Ventures. BEV is the Bill Gates fund which also includes investors such as Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos.

Maybe you are also interested

A "super worm" eating polystyrene can help us dispose of waste

BrintØ, an artificial island to produce green hydrogen

Toyota develops a cartridge to make hydrogen portable

Plastic recycling, shock report: "it doesn't work, and it will never work"

The company does not aim to replace recycling and composting, but "only" to manage the millions of tons of waste that today lie in landfills. "Let's take what we can no longer handle now," says Mike hart, CEO of Sierra Energy.

The system is able to process practically everything, even medical or hazardous waste (I doubt the radioactive ones). “We bring these materials to around 2300 ° C, twice the core of a volcano and much more than twice the size of an incinerator. At this temperature everything is broken down at the molecular level ".

How it works

The technology called FastOx makes use of a special modified blast furnace. By introducing pure oxygen into the apparatus, the process initiates a chemical reaction with the carbon present in the waste, increasing the heat. "Vaporizing waste does not require external energy supplements," Hart points out. “It's a simple carbon-oxygen chemical reaction”.

Environmental impact

The system uses steam to regulate the temperature, with a circuit that feeds itself with the introduction of landfill materials. Any metal in the waste melts and can be reused.

Unlike keeping them in landfills, vaporizing waste does not create methane thanks to the very high temperature: the steam generates only carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Unlike an incinerator, FastOx produces no emissions: all the gas produced is collected to be involved in a wide range of re-uses: electricity (with gas turbines), jet fuel, fertilizer. It is clear that when used as a fuel there will be emissions, but they are about 20 times lower than their fossil equivalent. The hydrogen produced by the process can also power emission-free vehicles.

The pilot plant

After 10 years of separately testing increasingly challenging pilot projects, the company's partners are now working together and focusing on a new plant. It is located at a US Army base in California, and has shown in early presentations how the process can produce both fuel and electricity ("vaporizers" will do one or the other when fully operational).

Given the costs of storing landfills, a system like FastOx that quickly gets rid of waste also allows significant savings.

The landfills themselves can turn into real power plants, vaporize waste and sell the energy produced by the vaporization process. The "vaporizers" could also act as a bridge solution to avoid the disastrous incineration and its deadly nanopowders.

Everything nice. Clearly, to get the word “incinerator” out of my head I will have to read a lot about this technology: the past and experience suggest caution.

tags: Bill GateshydrogenrecyclingGarbagestartupsteamSteamers
Previous post

Facebook finances thought-writing devices

Next Post

The robotic chameleon that knows how to interact with the environment

COLLABORATE

To submit articles, disclose the results of a research or scientific discoveries write to the editorial staff
  • millirobot

    Dawn of the Millirobot Planet: Here are 6 truly incredible ones

    1987 Shares
    Share 794 Tweet 497
  • New 3D batteries: electric vehicles over 98% charged in less than 10 minutes

    1335 Shares
    Share 534 Tweet 334
  • Solar paint: where are we?

    378 Shares
    Share 151 Tweet 94
  • Meta shows the impact of the Metaverse in its new campaign

    371 Shares
    Share 148 Tweet 93
  • A thermoelectric ink can lead us to heat-powered devices

    261 Shares
    Share 104 Tweet 65

archive

Have a look here:

Technology

The self-driving electric tractor is the future of agriculture

The Monarch autonomous tractor can become the equivalent of the 600 for the economic boom for the agriculture of the future. Here because.

Read More
brain map

Samsung wants to “copy and paste” the brain map onto 3D chip networks

The high-tech infrared sheets accelerate muscle recovery

solar park in the Philippines

Philippines, the largest solar park in the world cuts 1,4 million tons of coal

T1, AR glasses against covid-19: they "see" the temperature in real time

Next Post

The robotic chameleon that knows how to interact with the environment

The daily tomorrow

Futuroprossimo.it provides news on the future of technology, science and innovation: if there is something that is about to arrive, here it has already arrived. FuturoProssimo is part of the network ForwardTo, studies and skills for future scenarios.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Environment
Architecture
Artificial intelligence
Gadgets
concepts
Design

Staff
Archives
Advertising
Privacy Policy

Medicine
Spazio
Robotica
Work
Transportation
energia

To contact the FuturoProssimo editorial team, write to [email protected]

Chinese Version
Édition Française
Deutsche Ausgabe
Japanese version
English Edition
Edição Portuguesa
Русское издание
Spanish edition

The daily tomorrow

Futuroprossimo.it provides news on the future of technology, science and innovation: if there is something that is about to arrive, here it has already arrived. FuturoProssimo is part of the network ForwardTo, studies and skills for future scenarios.

Chinese Version
Édition Française
Deutsche Ausgabe
Japanese version
English Edition
Edição Portuguesa
Русское издание
Spanish edition

Staff
Archives
Advertising
Privacy Policy

Subscribe to our newsletter

To contact the FuturoProssimo editorial team, write to [email protected]

Categories

This work is distributed under license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
© 2021 Futuroprossimo

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Tech
  • Health
  • Environment
  • Architecture
  • energia
  • Transportation
  • Spazio
  • AI
  • concepts
  • Gadgets
  • Italy Next
  • H+