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Next Big Thing – sell your rubbish

Finally waste can be converted to energy. The future is here, and it’s plasma

Sell rubbish? Like in Steptoe and Son?

No, my miserly friend, you don’t need to make money from the rag-and-bone man, thanks to a fancy form of plasma. This is the fourth state, not quite gas or liquid, and is able (at extreme heats) to blast materials back to their molecular state. From your old socks to your mountain of beer cans, your rubbish can all be turned into valuable gases like carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

Wow, goodbye smelly bins all over town.

Not quite – at the moment the process requires a huge plant where the waste goes through temperatures as hot as 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit (as hot as lightning). For the time being it’s only happening at a US startup called S4 Energy Solutions (S4, as in the fourth state of matter, plasma). But with multi-million dollar investments flowing in it’s only a matter of time until recycling and binning rubbish are one and the same thing.

So I might as well stop recycling then?

Whoa there – we’re looking at a good few years before this becomes efficient enough to be worth the cost of converting. If hydrogen powered cars ever catch on (which doesn’t look likely) that would help create demand for the gas. Still, as gas supplies run low the world over, this could be the next big industry that makes Apple look poorer than the rag-and-bone man you used to sell your old junk to.

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Profile image of Dan Grabham Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home