Meet Joseph Longo’s Revolutionary Plasma Converter

Joseph Longo, CEO of Startech Environmental Corporation, has spent the best part of twenty years designing and building a machine with the appetite of a pig. Longo’s ‘plasma converter’ turns rubbish into clean energy, consuming anything thrown into its jaws and capable of rendering almost any toxic material, besides nuclear waste, harmless.

How does it work?

Rubbish is shovelled into the machine and shredded using a large drill. It is then fed into a plasma chamber where it is heated to 30,000° F. The superheated plasma is formed from stable gas using electrodes; a current is passed between two electrodes sitting inside a steel chamber filled with gas – in this case, just ordinary air. Electrons are ripped from the air and – hey presto – plasma is created. The plasma conducts current to create an intense, lightning-like energy so powerful that any rubbish entering the chamber is torn apart, molecule from molecule.

There are two by-products resulting from this process; syngas, a compound of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which can be turned into fuel, and molten glass which has several applications including the manufacture of tiles and road asphalt. Syngas is particularly useful as it means the converter can be completely self-sufficient after its first run.

How is it revolutionary?

At 15- foot tall and taking up the space of a two-car garage, the monster machine is actually surprisingly compact considering the amount of rubbish it can devour.  A single converter can burn through the waste of 1 million people daily – that’s 2,000 tons of waste per day that would otherwise have been sunk into a landfill.

At a price of $250 million, the converter certainly isn’t cheap, but Longo predicts that at the current cost of landfill a machine would pay itself off in 10 years, proving that clean doesn’t necessarily mean costly.

More pioneering methods

Traditionally, landfill has been extensively used for the disposal of many waste materials. But with sites are nearing capacity, pioneering methods are being employed. In order to assess the suitability of a waste material as a fuel a variety of parameters are tested on a wide variety of materials by MSSL (or Marchwood Scientific Services Ltd). For more information, read this article: Determining the Value of Waste Materials as Fuel Feedstock Using CHN Microanalysis.