The future of trash isn’t too hard to predict – there’s going to be a lot of it.

So what’s in store for the future of trash removal?

According to the EPA, the average American produces about 4.4 pounds of garbage a day. Thats an annual 240 million tons produced nationally. So how can the country that invented the internet and the airplane maintain it’s technological leadership under this hulking mountain of trash?

One very high-tech solution involves the blasting of garbage with lasers. While it may seem too sci-fi to be true, the process is known as plasma gasification and uses high electrical energy and high temperature to obliterate the molecular bonds that hold garbage together. The elements are separated and collected as gas, later to be used to power the facility itself.

Garbage zapping is already being used abroad with Florida on deck to be the first state in the US to bring this futuristic form of trash blasting into the present.

For more on the future of trash tech, check out this video.

Photo by gardinergirl.

Full NYT article here.

Green Air Filter:

Is Pixar so prescient?  Will our planet one day be deserted with no one left but WALL-E robots cubing massive heaps of trash our civilization simply couldn’t handle?  If you haven’t seen the movie, this article is another clear representation of the sad irony found in our increasingly futile effort to reuse and manage waste.

The grim fact being that recycled materials are too costly for countries like China to buy back from top exporters like the US is what’s creating the log jam.  This overpriced approach to renewables even goes beyond materials and scares consumers away from such energy utility programs offering wind, hydroelectric, and solar power at a costly premium.  Seems the true innovation here requires absolute altruism on the part of it’s inventors to excavate us from these rising mountains of expensive trash.

Photo by ghb624.