Here is the link: http://www.plascoenergygroup.com/?Media_Centre#Animated-Video

It is certainly valid to say that heavy metals should not make it into the normal waste stream. However, I still think that may be a big barrier to the adoption of the solid byproduct for any commercial use. If I were running a company that were considering using this glass material for construction or some other purpose I would want a very solid answer to the question… what if some knuckle head finds a big box of old mercury thermometers and decides to just toss it in the trash. Saying that the waste is 99.999% safe means something entirely different if there is a chance all the bad stuff gets concentrated in a handful of the output that ends up being one square foot of my kitchen counter (as an extreme example). It would not matter to me that 10,000 other people got shiny black counter tops with no contamination.

Having said that, this technology might make economic and environmental sense even without a use for the byproduct. It would still dramatically reduce the waste stream needing to be buried.

the plasco system is “smart”. It uses a secondary “high carbon” stream made up of unrecylable waste and a sophisticated software system to regulate its stream. This way, it can deal with fluctuations in the primary waste stream’s content.

That said, you are right. This system can’t perform magic. I believe that heavy metals that aren’t safely entrained in the residual solid are removed using activated carbon that is then sent for controlled displosal. The way I see it, this stuff should not have been in the waste stream to begin with (batteries, thermometers, CFL bulbs, etc..) so this system just sees to it that these things don’t sit in landfills and cause problems. Anyway, I think it amounts to something like 0.001% of the volume of waste processed.

But one question I would have is how much testing has been done. I’m pretty certain that one could construct an artificial batch of garbage where the residue solid was not a nice glass like substance. That raises the question of how they guarantee that too much of really nasty things like lead, cadmium or maybe even radionuclides aren’t mixed in and that enough stuff like glass is mixed in to assure the consistency of the residue. This thing doesn’t perform magic. If you fed it 500 pounds of rusty nails and a few old lead acid batteries, you’re not getting glass out of it. In fact you’d get lead contaminated iron as the solid.

It still might be a manageable waste stream since the amount of solid is greatly reduced… but until I hear more, I’m very skeptical that there will be commercial uses for the residue solid.

However, I think many of the environmental objections to this sort of processing have to do with the solid waste which is produced, and that was all but glossed over in the interview. The glass like material that is produced is where many of the nasty things like heavy metals will reside. There are questions as to whether the varying composition of waste streams will result in a material which is always stable, impervious to leaching, cracking etc. The claim by the company was that this material has many uses. What are these uses and have a sufficiently large sampling of the waste “glass” been tested for safety and suitability for these uses? If you get a chance to follow up at some future time, I hope you ask these questions.