![]() InEnTec’s technology, which the team developed and tested for years before opening the company’s first commercial-scale production facility in 2008, “allows waste to come into a chamber and be exposed to extreme temperatures - a controlled bolt of lightning of over 10,000 degrees Celsius,” Surma explains. They filed for patents, and with business help from a fourth co-founder, Larry Dinkin, InEnTec was born a facility was established in Richland, Washington, near PNNL. Titus, to combine the plasma technology with a joule-heating melter, a device Surma had been developing to trap hazardous wastes in molten glass. MIT provided the critical large-scale space and facilities support for building the plasma furnace.Īfter the MIT project ended, Cohn and Surma teamed up with an engineer from General Electric, Charles H. Plasma is at the core of fusion research, which aims to replicate the energy-producing powers of the sun, which is essentially a ball of plasma. Department of Energy funding to build and operate an experimental waste treatment furnace facility at MIT using plasma - a superheated, highly ionized gas. He teamed up with Surma, who was working on nuclear waste cleanup at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and they obtained U.S. “We decided to look into an environmental application.” “Fusion is very long-term, so I wondered if we could find something that would be useful for societal benefit more near-term,” he says. Cohn, who was then head of the Plasma Technology Division at the PSFC, wanted to identify new ways to use technologies being developed for nuclear fusion. The story of InEnTec begins at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) in the early 1990s. Diverting one ton of municipal solid waste from landfills is equivalent - “at a minimum” - to preventing one ton of CO 2 from reaching the atmosphere, he notes. “People today understand that decarbonization of our energy and industrial system has to occur,” says Surma. Now, however, Surma says the company is expanding with projects that include plastics recycling and low-cost distributed hydrogen fuel production - using advanced versions of their core technologies to keep waste out of landfills and greenhouse gases out of the air. Surma, adding that many people at the time didn’t even believe in the phenomenon.Īs a result, for many years the company concentrated on providing niche services to heavy industries and governments with serious toxic waste problems. “Back in the early ’90s, global warming was more of an academic pursuit,” says InEnTec president, CEO, and co-founder Jeffrey E. The process is more expensive than throwing trash in a landfill, however, and climate change considerations weren’t a major driver of investment 25 years ago. (The company’s name originally stood for Integrated Environmental Technologies.) Spun out of MIT in 1995, InEnTec uses a process called plasma gasification to turn any kind of trash - even biological, radioactive, and other hazardous waste - into valuable chemical products and clean fuels. ![]() “About 130 million tons of waste per year go into landfills in the U.S., and that produces at least 130 million tons of CO 2-equivalent emissions,” Cohn says, noting that most of these emissions come in the form of methane, a naturally occurring gas that is much worse for the climate than carbon dioxide (CO 2).įor Cohn, working on the MITEI study made it clear that the time was ripe for InEnTec - a company he co-founded - to expand its business. That problem is greenhouse gas emissions. Cohn, currently an MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) research scientist, when he was the executive director of MITEI’s Future of Natural Gas study. ![]() ![]() Landfills take up space, of course, but there is a much more serious problem associated with them - one that was underscored for Daniel R. Today’s recycling doesn’t handle complexity well, so the typical chip bag is destined for the landfill. It’s got film plastic, metal, dyes, and food residue it’s complicated. Anyone who has ever hesitated in front of a trash bin knows the problem: It’s hard to determine what can be recycled.
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