EST: Making Chemical Waste Disappear Into Thin Air?
by Karin Kloosterman, Jerusalem, Israel on 05.28.07
It’s not just animals that suffer from drug studies and clinical trials. Loads and loads of toxins, plastics and waste is part of the business. We briefly touched on the topic of greening the pharmaceutical industry through using virtual patients employed by Optimata here. Chemicals and Pharma industry by-products can no longer just go down the drain or disposed of in developing countries. They need to be disposed of in a safe manner so that human health and the environment is not endangered.
That brings us to the point of this post: EST for Environmental Systems and Treatments -- a company that has developed a device that claims to almost completely destroy chemical waste, converting it into water and carbon dioxide or into materials that can be recycled by the industry.
EST's chemical waste elimination system is similar to that we reported on here for neutralizing radioactive waste: plasma technology. In nature, says 21c, plasma can be found in lightning bolts; in EST system, liquid or gas waste is pumped into the device and then treated by a narrow high-powered plasmatronic beam generated inside the reactor. Sounds Sci-Fi. This produces heat of several thousand degrees (2,000 to 4,500 degrees centigrade), breaking apart the molecular bonds of the waste compounds. These compounds are then rapidly cooled and cleaned, leaving nothing but harmless gaseous products, which are in line with Israeli and international standards.
"This is a very environmentally friendly machine and promises zero waste discharge," says Yehuda Simon, founder of the company.
We’d be interested in hearing from our readers their thoughts on plasma technology. Is it legit, or too good to be true? ::Israel21c
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This is a very old technology that just keeps coming back for more ever few years. Same thing happens with the miraculous "PCB eating" bacteria or fungi - every two years they recycle the press releases and then it goes no where.
As with all remediation technology, energy intensity (electricity consumption in this case) and logistics make or break the business model. If one has to collect waste in small containers or accept one-off shipments, the material handling and shipping costs get really high, driving up prices. Success hinges on whether the technology should be "mobile" - brought to the waste - or central - with large volumes of waste shipped to it. With a small country like Israel, a central facility would soon have to seek access to foreign waste generators, leading to a host of new logistical and political complications. It ain't easy, reagardless of how "efficient" the process is.
Well, there's a company called Star Tech that's designed a plasma induced fusion process that makes more electricity than it uses... breaks whatever is fed into the system into it's substrates and allows for collection of specific elements and the end of the reaction. As it's a closed system, none of the gas is allowed to escape. All the solid waste (silica, heavy metals and whatnot) are left behind in an obsidian-like slag material, which Startech says could be used for building material, but with all the heavy metals involved, probably not a great idea, unless it's being used as a concrete aggregate.
This doesn't make sense when it comes to nuclear waste. How can radioactive elements be made safer just by breaking bonds? It would be nice to know what the gaes formed are. Oxygen and nitrogen? What about the carbon?
Ive read about the plasma gasification technology before, and ive also read that certain chemicals get broken down into more toxic forms, sucj as dioxins etc. just a point