20,000 homes… So what are we waiting for??

You guys, a company called GreenSky is taking in sorted municipal and commercial waste and

outputting JET FUEL. Yep. Trash to airplane fuel. Boeing flew a 787 using biofuel last

year to prove it could be done, but GreenSky wants to make enough fuel from trash to supply

ALL the needs for London City Airport. British Airways has pledged to purchase ALL 50,000

metric tons of fuel from GreenSky! They're going to fly all over using your TRASH for

fuel and also charge you to put a bag into the bin… not the trash bin, Brits, the OVERHEAD

bin.

Look, trash is everywhere. We throw away 4.3 pounds (2kg) of waste every day and 55% of

all the trash generated in the United States goes into landfills. But, according to Scientific

American, if we converted the 460 million tons of trash produced in North America properly,

we could make 12.4 billion gallons (47B liters) of ethanol. That's a lotta hooch -- roughly

the same amount as produced from all ethanol-bound corn. And the process is REALLY easy; all

you need is to unleash some sulfuric acid to break down the cellulose, and some select

enzymes and microbes to ferment the resulting slurry into fuel. Done, you're flying.

Biofuel from trash is great, but we need to separate the trash BEFORE we can do that.

So while we use that in the future, we can ALSO burn grandpa's trash too! In 1986 there

were over 7,600 small dumps, today there are around 1900 mega-dumps which should have enough

capacity for centuries of garbage. In 2008, power from landfills exceeded solar power

production in New York and New Jersey, and it's expanded significantly in the last seven

years. Of the 1900 landfills over 640 have added the technology to harness the power

of landfill gases (LFGs) and converting them to energy.

LFG is produced by anaerobic bacteria (bacteria that doesn't need oxygen) buried deep within

landfills. The anaerobic bacteria munch on our trash and poop out methane which would

NORMALLY be real bad. Methane is 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2, and

according to the EPA, municipal solid waste is the third-largest source of human-related

methane emissions in the US. But, if we capture it before it floats up and makes climate change

worse, we can use it for good AND chillax with some oil burning too.

Methane is an odorless, colorless hydrocarbon (CH4), and because the bacteria are trapped

underground, companies can find pockets and suck it out with high-vacuum pipes. Once collected,

the methane is cooled, cleaned, and mixed with mercaptan to give it a detectable odor

before they send it out to natural gas plants to be burned for fuel. Yep, natural gas can

come from rock, or oil deposits but that's a "dirty" natural gas, a mix of 99 percent

methane with some propane, ethane and sulfur and helium mixed in. The biomass methane is

pretty much just CH4. Bacteria are good like that.

The EPA's Landfill Methane Outreach Program is hoping to encourage companies to set up

on top of landfills and suck in as much methane as possible, because otherwise we're just

letting dollars float away. As of 2013, LFG captured energy was powering 1.8 million homes.

So just to recap, we throw away a lot of stuff and just let it sit there, but thanks to these

technologies getting trashy could clean up

the world.