Near future
No Result
View All Result
December 5 2023
  • Home
  • Tech
  • Healthcare
  • Ambiente
  • Energy
  • Transports
  • Spazio
  • AI
  • concepts
  • H+
News about the world of tomorrow.
CES2023 / Coronavirus / Russia-Ukraine
Near future
  • Home
  • Tech
  • Healthcare
  • Ambiente
  • Energy
  • Transports
  • Spazio
  • AI
  • concepts
  • H+

News about the world of tomorrow.

No Result
View All Result
Ambiente, Technology

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.

July 31 2019
Gianluca RiccioGianluca Riccio
⚪ 3 minutes
Share30Pin10Tweet19SendShare5ShareShare4
Spray waste

Follow the Futuro Prossimo Whatsapp Channel! Daily updates and extra content.

Sign up for free

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.

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 deal with," says Mike hart, CEO of Sierra Energy.

The article continues after the related links

Sand to Green, a startup in Morocco wants to make the desert fertile in 5 years

Airloom, a device promises wind power at a third of the current cost

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 GateshydrogenrecyclingWaste ManagementstartupsteamSteamers


GPT Chat Megaeasy!

Concrete guide for those approaching this artificial intelligence tool, also designed for the school world: many examples of applications, usage indications and ready-to-use instructions for training and interrogating Chat GPT.

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

Latest news

Power waves: transforming sea movement into energy for ships

Mind Uploading: putting your mind on a computer? For some it is possible

Forget everything: with Uni Wheel Hyundai reinvents the wheel

Granville T.Woods, the African-American genius that Edison tried to steal

Basic income in Kenya: surprising results from the global experiment

Small as an A4 sheet: The crazy Arma electric scooter

Traumatic brain injuries, EyeD can save your life in minutes

Cerabyte, the incredible ceramic memory: 10.000TB in one hand

The "dream" of robotic pizza fails: half a billion dollar collapse

No-Kids, more and more people choose life without children (and regrets)

The EU is making a big push for the cleanest energy in the world

Prophetic, the startup that wants to make us work even in our sleep

Follow us on the Futuroprossimo channels! We're up Telegram, Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Analysis.

FacebookTwitterInstagramTelegramAnalysisMastodonPinterestTikTok

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.

  • Ambiente
  • Architecture
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Gadgets
  • concepts
  • Design
  • Medicine
  • Spazio
  • Robotica
  • Work
  • Transports
  • Energy
  • Edition Francaise
  • Deutsche Ausgabe
  • Japanese version
  • English Edition
  • Portuguese Edition
  • Read more
  • Spanish edition

Subscribe to our newsletter

  • The Editor
  • Advertising on FP
  • Privacy Policy

© 2023 Near future - Creative Commons License
This work is distributed under license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

No Result
View All Result
News about the world of tomorrow.
  • Home
  • Tech
  • Healthcare
  • Ambiente
  • Energy
  • Transports
  • Spazio
  • AI
  • concepts
  • H+