Posted by
Rich from Paso on Thursday, March 08, 2007 4:20:36 PM
In trying to have a wide spectrum of ideas and solutions to problems, this one goes back to my high school days. Under the category of "environmental stewardship", I propose that the federal government provide grants to the 50 states to build plasma arc incinerators in their largest municipalities to process contaminates and render them back to their constituent elements.
Plasma incineration is a relatively new field of waste processing that uses temperature as high as 7,000 degrees F to break down everything from illicit drugs to toxic waste contaminated soil to simple trash down to its constituent elements. The residual elemental components can be filtered off, reprocessed and reintroduced to the environment with almost no residual impact. More information can be found at these websites:
http://www.usplasma.com/Engineering/Overview/overview.html
http://www.epa.gov/ord/scienceforum/2005/pdfs/oeiposter/Bodurow_OEI30.pdf#search=
How should government policy change once these facilities are up and running? First, all municipalities larger than 250,000 should be forbidden from opening any new landfills. This will necessitate the need to use the plasma facilities. Second, the federal government should mandate a 20 year cleanup window to have all existing landfills closed and cleaned up. This again will necessitate the use of the facilities and increase the demand for more plasma incineration facilities. Third, fines for illegal dumping should increase by a factor of 100.
The net result is that in 20 years all landfills would be closed, all waste would be reprocessed through plasma incineration facilities and illegal dumping would become a thing of the past. And the best part of it all? It would all be tax-deductible under my tax plan.