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Why do we ask this question?
Commercial aviation alone contributes around three percent of total global carbon emissions. But the industry is actively looking for green solutions in the form of sustainable jet fuel, and in one case, that fuel may have had a previous life as your household food scraps. In one study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado and other institutions details a method of converting food waste into sustainable jet fuel that can be used in existing engines.
Biomass, such as manure and food waste, can be converted into biofuels, which are renewable liquid fuels made from organic matter. Ethanol and biodiesel are two common types of renewable biofuel, but making sustainable aviation fuel is a more complicated process—it’s got to be so similar to the petroleum-based jet fuel we use today so it can “drop-in” existing engines and aircraft. Reimagining the airplane engine to run on different types of fuel will take time, so the goal is to design a fuel that can be used now. The researchers were able to use volatile fatty acids from fermenting old food waste and convert it to simple paraffin molecules that can be used in fuel and really aren’t all that different chemically from traditional fossil fuels. Other sustainable aviation fuels have been made from biomass, specifically oil, fat, and grease from vegetables and animals, but using our ever-mounting pile of food waste to fuel flight broadens those possibilities.
