People are trying to make jet fuel out of coconut oil and algae, so why not garbage?

That's what they're thinking at the Solena Group, a Washington DC company that builds and operates renewable energy power plants in North America, Asia and Europe. The company has started work on a facility that will make jet fuel from trash, tree bark and even manure through a process called plasma gasification. It uses 5,000-degree plasma arcs to break trash into gas fuel, which is then converted into liquid suitable for powering an airplane.

Between the plasma gasification and gas-to-liquid conversion, the process will release plenty of CO2 into the environment, but the company says that's nothing compared to the emissions created by decomposing landfill waste and continued reliance on petroleum-based aviation fuel. (According to the Department of Transportation, aviation accounts for 2.7 percent of the country's annual greenhouse gas output.) And energy generated from the plasma arcs is used to power the system, making it self-sustaining.

Solena plans to build its plant in Gilroy, California, where it can be fed with a steady stream of household trash from Norcal Waste Systems, a big California garbage collection company.

The company's success is far from assured: it won't begin production until 2011 but some US biofuel tax credits are scheduled to expire in 2008, so far no commercial airline has publicly expressed interest in the project, and the price of jet fuel could drop again before the garbage-gas project gets off the ground (highly unlikely, though you never know).

But according to The Register, Solena does have one big friend on its side. Eager to diversify its fuel sources, the Navy is evidently interested in working with the company. And that' not a bad customer to start with.

Photo by Flickr user Quasimime.