I may have mentioned before, just once or twice, that I’m a bit of a nerd. Fortunately, that works well for me in my job. I’m able to get nerdily excited about writing about ethanol, which makes it easier to enjoy my job. My last feature story, “Trash to Bio-Treasure,” published in the November issue of Ethanol Producer Magazine, was a lot of fun for me to research and write. I really enjoyed talking to people about the municipal solid waste (MSW)-to-ethanol projects in the works by Enerkem and Fiberight LLC.

I was particularly fascinated by the various items of garbage that are collected, sorted and used to produce ethanol and other products. In Enerkem’s case, the company receives the garbage pre-sorted from the city of Edmonton, Alberta. The Canadian city has years of experience in separating recyclable material and organic material, which is processed and sold as compost for residential or business use. Fiberight, on the other hand, has worked to develop its own separation technology, which it has proved out at its demo facility in Lawrenceburg, Va. So all the different product streams, including ethanol, recyclable materials and compressed natural gas (CNG) produced from food waste, are revenue streams for Fiberight.

While I was talking to Craig Stuart-Paul, chief executive of Fiberight, I just couldn’t resist asking him about that scene in Back to the Future 2. Do you remember when Doc Brown drives up (from the future) and raids Marty’s garbage for fuel for the DeLorean? He opens up the “Mr. Fusion” on the top of the car, throws in some banana peels, pours in the last dregs of a can of beer (if I’m not mistaken, it’s Miller High Life) and then adds the actual can too. It’s a funny and fascinating scene and I couldn’t help thinking about it when preparing to write my story about MSW-to-ethanol. There are some differences, of course, but it’s still a very cool and futuristic thing that Fiberight and Enerkem are doing.

Neither Enerkem or Fiberight will be making transportation fuel from banana peels or old, stale beer. (Nor aluminum cans, for that matter.) And none of us has a car with a Mr. Fusion on top, requiring only a trip to the nearest garbage can for power. Still, it’s exciting to know that nearly all the garbage in the communities Enerkem and Fiberight will be operating ethanol plants in will be used for some useful purpose. When it’s all said and done, the city of Edmonton expects 90 percent of its trash will avoid getting dumped at a landfill and Fiberight expects to recover up to 80 percent of the trash it receives for sorting. That’s a very good thing.

I had another silly little flight of fancy during my conversation with Stuart-Paul. I was thinking of all that food waste, destined for the company’s anaerobic digester to produce CNG, which will eventually be sold as a transportation fuel. It brought me back to my childhood. When I didn’t eat everything on my plate I remember my grandparents telling me that if I didn’t eat it all they’d have to pack it up and send it to the starving children in Africa. (They raised my mother to clean her plate but she felt that contributed to overeating and didn’t require my siblings and me to do the same. In looking back, perhaps the Africa comment was said out of some frustration in not being able to control the food waste situation.)

After I had this admittedly silly thought, I started to wonder if I was the only child to hear the starving children in Africa line. So I conducted an informal email poll of my coworkers. Turns out, of the handful that replied, only one other coworker was told pretty much the exact thing I was—that his leftovers would be mailed to Africa. We agreed that was pretty silly, considering that by the time the food got there it would be unappetizing at the least and more likely rotten.

One other coworker confirmed that his parents talked about the starving children in Africa, but without the mailing food to them part. The rest of the answers revealed that the location of the poor children varied, with one creative set of parents using Russia or China, depending on if the meal contained potatoes or rice. Another coworker said his parents talked about the children in Asia. “At 7 years old, I wasn’t quite sure what that had to do with me not liking onions,” he said. Four of my coworkers said hungry children in other countries never came into the conversation at all, it was just about not wasting food and/or getting adequate nutrition.

Now, companies like Enerkem and Fiberight are turning decades of parental guidance on its head. In Marion, Iowa, where Fiberight has a 15-year MSW supply agreement to accept the city’s trash, including food waste, what will parents tell their children? Suddenly, the food they don’t eat is going to produce a useful and marketable fuel, rather than just going to waste. Sorry parents, you’ll have to find another way to get your child to eat her veggies.

Oh, and if you are a nerd like me, you might want to watch that scene from Back to the Future 2. If you want to move forward to the garbage scene, start at about the one minute mark.