We can create any technology we want, and there is no environmental problem to which there is not a technological solution. This is a very old, very rooted belief: the techno-fix. It doesn’t matter that there’s hardly ever been a technological solution that didn’t create some new technological problem. One of the most egregious examples of this pattern is the way the treatment of US children in the 1940s and 1950s for acne, tonsilitis, adenoids and ringworm with high-dosage X-rays later turned out (according to the National Cancer Institute) to have given thyroid cancer to as many as 4 million people. But there are plenty of other examples: nuclear power, DDT, thalidomide; the list goes on and on.

And here is another example. 

More than one-third of the ash generated at the country’s hundreds of coal-fired plants is now recycled — mixed with cement to build highways or used to stabilize embankments, among other things.

But in a process being used increasingly across the nation, chemicals are injected into plants’ emissions to capture airborne pollutants. 

 

That, in turn, changes the composition of the ash and cuts its usefulness. It can’t be used in cement, for example, because the interaction of the chemicals may keep the concrete from hardening. 

 

That ash has to go somewhere — so it usually ends up in landfills, along with the rest of the unusable waste.

Quick recap: Inject ash with chemicals to address airborne pollutants; the now hyper-toxic ash might not poison the air as much, but now has devastating effects on the land and water in the area. I wonder what techno-fix they’ll think of to address that. Probably nothing if it’s just dumped in a landfill. Out of sight, out of mind.