Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Neat, but the carbon monoxide doesn't sound good.

Very illuminative, gluonium!

I've read that Sweden has waste incineration plants that produce near-zero emissions -- not to mention that their legal system promotes corporate responsibility for the waste from whatever products they produce, so a much smaller percentage of their garbage needs to be disposed of. Here in Canada, some steps are being taken in that direction as well, but we still have a long way to go!

Now I thought that was the sort of story that could have benefited from some actual scientific thought. It sounds great, but they didn't really answer anything. There are a lot more elements in a waste stream than just hydrogen, and I suspect most of them become gas. Not surprisingly mostly carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide from what they indicated. So, to be a good environmental solution this process would also need a way to sequester the gas emissions. Maybe they are doing that, but not at all clear from the segment.

CO is of course toxic but you can burn it to give CO2 like anything else. The CO2 could be sequestered but the methane that seeps from landfills is rarely sequestered and its hugely more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2 so even if the CO2 isn't sequestered you're still making out better than putting the trash into a landfill. Of course there are a lot more elements in the waste stream than just the hydrogen and carbon but the rest of all the other elements are reduced to a vitrified slag that is like a piece of inert glass. Heavy metals like cadmium lead and mercury should not be put into the reactor but even if they are...they're vitrified. They're going to be made into nearly completely inert rock that is surely no more dangerous than the original heavy metal ores that were mined to obtain the metals in the first place.

The wikipedia article gives more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_waste_disposal

Basically, there are still air quality problems, but I wonder if they're as bad as traditional incenerators?

and of course -something- is burned to make the electricity to make the plasma arc in the first place.

um, yeah, the syngas that you get out of the reactor.