St. Lucie landfill could create future without trash

By BRIAN SKOLOFF The Associated Press
Welcome to the future, where trash is fuel and landfills are obsolete.

Trash to power isn't a new idea, but Geoplasma, a sister company of Atlanta-based Jacoby Development Inc., has a grand plan to take it into the science fiction realm and do away with dumps by vaporizing garbage into synthetic gas and steam to create electricity.

The company plans to build a $425 million plasma arc gasification facility in St. Lucie County, the first of its kind in the nation and the largest in the world. The facility should be up in about two years.

It will generate heat hotter than the sun's surface and will gasify and melt 3,000 tons of garbage a day by creating an arc between two electrodes and using high pressure air to form plasma. It's a process similar to how lightning is formed in nature.

Molten material much like lava created from melted organic matter — up to 600 tons a day — will be hardened into rock form, or slag, and sold for use in road and construction projects. It also will gasify sludge from the county's wastewater plant, and steam will be sold to a neighboring Tropicana Products Inc. facility to power the juice plant's turbines.

"This is sustainability in its truest and finest form," Geoplasma President Hilburn Hillestad said.
For years, some waste management facilities have been converting methane — created by rotting trash in landfills — to power. Plants also burn trash to produce electricity.
Experts say population growth will limit space available for future landfills.

The facility in St. Lucie County aims to eliminate the need for a landfill. Only two similar facilities are operating in the world — both in Japan — but are gasifying garbage on a much smaller scale.

FUTURE OF LANDFILL
• St. Lucie County officials estimate their entire landfill — 4.3 million tons of trash — will be gone in 18 years.
• The plant will produce enough synthetic gas — a substitute for natural gas — to power up to 43,000 homes annually, and to run the facility free from outside electricity.