Michiaki Shigehiro has a rare problem. "I've struggled to find enough garbage," he says, in dead seriousness. He already sees a lot of waste, on average 100 tonnes per day, but hed be far happier with twice as much. Shigehiro is general business manager of EcoValley Utashinai, a company named after a remote city in Japan's northern island of Hokkaido. Eco Valley converts heaps of refuse into energy using a plasma arc, a jolt of electricity that ionizes gas in a chamber and produces temperatures of up to 16,000 deg C, or almost three times hotter than the Sun's surface. The technology is costly and must process massive amounts of trash to recoup Eco Valley s 7-bil-lion (US 59-million dollar) investment.
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