ARCHIVES

Every recycling system today follows one rule: sort first. The fine, mixed residue that sorting cannot handle, most of an old landfill, is capped, burned or buried again. The PARAMANU Reclaimer (Plasma-Assisted Recovery And Mining of Atoms, Neutralizing Urban-waste) starts where sorting ends: a sealed, stack-free plasma reactor turns the residue fully into gas, and condensers at falling temperatures separate its elements band by band. We call this architecture Atomize-First. We derive eight design principles from established thermodynamics, with proofs, and test the design with an open simulation on NASA data, a 5,000-feed sweep and repeated rechecks of the computation. The results support it, placing valuable and toxic volatile metals in different bands, and correct it: the hot zone must last only tens of milliseconds, and mercury needs its own trap. Fume, fine particles that can carry metals past their condenser, is the largest open threat. Predictions registered before any experiment will judge a working plant. All code and data are public.