One Person's Trash is Another's Treasure

The military hopes to put garbage in and take energy out through a pilot Army project to turn trash into fuel.

There are a handful of municipal waste-to-fuel plants in the United States, including one in Montgomery County, Md., but the Army has a new twist on this concept.

The Edgewood, Md., Chemical Biological Center has developed a prototype Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery that will convert the 2,500 pounds of trash generated daily by a 500-person unit into enough gas to power a small electric generator.

James Valdes, scientific adviser for biotechnology at the Edgewood center, said the Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery metabolizes waste into ethanol and compresses undigested waste into pellets which are then converted into a gas used to power a generator.

The tactical refinery has one of those zero carbon footprints we all would like to achieve, the Army said, and produces a benign ash good for fertilizing roses, Valdes added. (Assuming, I imagine, the rose bushes have not been run over by tanks.)

I can hardly wait until this becomes a commercial product; I hate going to the dump.