Hi, I'm Flora Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday. As you might have noticed,

it's winter, and I am already dreaming of warmer weather. So how about a mind vacation to one of the

hottest places on Earth, an erupting volcano. We asked you for your burning volcano questions,

and you have been blowing up our voicemail.

Hi, this is Kathy. I'm from Boulder, Colorado, and I have this question that nobody seems

clear about, and that is, why are we not able to drop large amounts of plastic debris right into a volcano?

Could volcanoes be the solution to plastic waste disposal?

I just want to hear a volcanologist point of view. Thank you.

Kathy, we have just the volcanologist for you.

Tams and Maylor has trekked to volcanoes in Chile, Guatemala, Italy, and beyond to learn their secrets. And she is here to field your questions. Tamsin, welcome to Science Friday. Hi there. Okay, first of all, let's start with Kathy's query. What are your thoughts on treating volcanoes like giant trash incinerators?

Well, I really like Kathy's idea that, you know, we definitely need to do something about all our plastic waste.

So, you know, it's good to have creative solutions.

We do incinerate plastic waste in incinerators, and we can use that to generate heat energy, which has some payback.

The problem we're throwing it into an active volcano is that active volcano is very hot.

And so what that will do is burn the plastic debris.

This releases toxic fumes as well as other stuff, as well as carbon

as well, of course. And the issue when you're doing that in an active volcanoes, it's quite

tricky to fit active volcanoes with good filtration devices to get rid of all those toxic fumes, whereas we have a much

better chance of doing that if we do it, if we burn plastic waste in it, in incinerators,

generate heat energy and electrical energy as well. So it's a great idea, and we do it on our sort of

human scale in some parts of the world.

But the problem is we don't then have any control over the toxic fumes coming out, and they're

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