Trash into treasure: Indiana company to make ethanol from municipal solid waste.

IT MADE FOR GREAT comedy in "Back to the Future." At the end, Christopher Lloyd's character returned from the future in his DeLorean time machine, having replaced the vehicle's nuclear reactor with a fusion energy source powered by household trash. Funny thing is, an Indiana company will soon be making something like that happen, converting trash into ethanol fuel suitable for powering cars--maybe even DeLoreans.

Agresti Biofuels last summer announced plans to build the nation's first facility designed to convert municipal solid waste into cellulosic ethanol. It's a process that's completely clean, with no air or water pollution, and it even results in the recycling of such waste materials as plastics, rubber and metal. By the time Agresti Biofuels is done with the garbage, very little is left for the landfill.

Construction of the first plant will begin in early 2009 in Pike County, Kentucky, and in less than two years it'll be processing several hundred tons of municipal trash a day. Futuristic as it sounds, it's actually not a brand-new concept, Resiak says. "The technology has been around for a long time, but we're the first to put a company together to use it in a commercial process."

The process runs municipal solid waste through a liquid-based sorting procedure that's not all that different from what a wastewater treatment plant uses. It's all about gravity--some substances float, some items sink, some things get caught in the middle. The process is designed to pull out organic solids, paper and other cellulosic materials, which are converted into glucose. Like a moonshine still in the hills of Kentucky, the plant ferments that glucose into...

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