At the U.S. military's headquarters in Iraq, it's garbage in, power out.
Two prototype generators -- running on food slop, shredded documents and ammunition wrappers -- have helped supply power to Camp Victory, near Baghdad, since early May.
About 50 percent of the diesel that the military burns in Iraq is devoted to transporting more fuel. And about half of that gets poured into generators and stoves. Which is not just a huge waste of time, money, and effort. It's also a security issue. "Those convoys that carry fuel are also known as targets," Army biotech scientist Dr. James Valdes tells a group of bloggers. "So our logic was that at a forward operating base, could we use the garbage to make fuel and thereby get rid of the garbage and help to keep the convoys off the streets."
Enter the Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery, or TGER.
Cardboard, plastic, styrofoam and other dry trash is dumped in the machine's chute, smushed into pellets, and heated until becomes a synthetic gas -- a kind of low-grade propane. Foods and liquids are fermented into ethanol. The syn-gas and the ethanol are combined. And that's what powers the generator.
"Starting up the contraption takes six hours and still requires five percent of the diesel the generator usually uses, or about one gallon per hour," *CNET *notes.
And "the system isn't without an environmental downside, with the TGER producing some carbon dioxide as a byproduct," *CleanTech *observes.
But the amount of fuel that has to be transported -- and opened up to ambushes and roadside bombs -- is much less. And there's "about a 30
to one reduction in garbage with TGER, in garbage volume," Valdes says.
"Which is good, because that's fewer garbage trucks that you've got to have hauling stuff to the dump site. And those garbage trucks are also a risk."
[Photo: U.S. Army]
