Gasification and Making Things From Trash

Making things out of mountains of trash: This is a breakthrough that I saw a movie about, it’s a company in Israel where pellets emerge at the end of the process that spins, heats up, and sprays water through the garbage.

Other companies are creating gasification plants that turn waste into a burnable gas. “More than 9000 entities have contacted them asking when they can build a plant like that in their own cities.”

More and more reports are sharing the stories of very innovative inventors who have created ways to take mountains of garbage and create useful plastic products, roads in South Korea which were built using recycled plastic waste and so many others.

A company called UBQ Materials in Israel has developed a system that takes bags of household trash–full of everything like compost, plastic, and paper, and grinds it up and processes it until what’s left are pellets.

Here is a snip from the Washington Post article about the company.

Eight tons of trash are piled high at the entrance of a small factory in this tree-lined kibbutz — rotting food mixed with plastic bags, dirty paper, castoff bottles and containers, even broken toys. But nothing is headed for a landfill. Instead, what’s next is a process that could revolutionize recycling.

Within hours, the mound will be sorted, ground, chopped, shredded, cleaned and heated into a sort of garbage caramel, then resurrected as tiny pseudo-plastic pellets that can be made into everyday items like trays and packing crates.

““The magic that we’re doing is we’re taking everything — the chicken bones, the banana peels,” says Jack “Tato” Bigio, the chief executive at UBQ Materials. “We take this waste, and we convert it.”

The important thing that UBQ is doing is keeping tons of methane out of the atmosphere, since landfills are where much of the problematic methane is created, wafting up from the rotting trash.