Hazardous wastes treatment and disposal becomes a very impotent topic for environmental protection, and the Thermal Treatment Technologies for hazardous wastes are focused by entire society. As one of the most important hazardous wastes, the medical waste can carry infective bacteria and virus, and chemical waste may have heavy metals and organic toxics in it. Traditional measures for municipal solid waste (MSW), such as landfill, composting and incineration, are not very good measures for hazardous wastes. They may become the new pollutant resource. Even the incineration can destroy the microbes and the organics in bio-medical waste, but it may release acid off-gas.

    IMCAS invents several plasma pyrolysis technologies for hazardous wastes treatments, which can avoid the defects of landfill, composting and traditional incineration, and becomes the model of clean-process and energy-saving. These patented inventions are sponsored by National High-Tech Project (863) and CAS key project for Knowledge Innovation Program. The invents are including several technologies and devices, which cover many sectors for plasma waste treatment technologies, such as: a plasma-arc technology facility for hazardous wastes treatment economically, a pyrolysis facility combining plasma-arc and Joule-Heat for organic wastes, a plasma pyrolysis furnace with enhanced pyrolysis effect for organic wastes with little auxiliary oxygen supply, a multi-stage plasma pyrolysis furnace for multi-sort of organic wastes and a full system including pre-treatment system, plasma arc generator, reactor and off-gas treatment system.

    By these devices and technologies, not only the waste can be treatment and the useful byproducts can be recovered, such as: black carbon, metals and combustible gas. Another advantage of pyrolysis is that the off-gas of plasma pyrolysis is only 5-10 % of incineration, and is very easy and economically treated. The bottom ash is also very little, is about only 0.3% of originals. Many wastes, such as waste plastics, medical waste, waste electronic (PCB), can be treatment by these devices.