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London's Garbage Will Soon Fuel Some British Airways Flights

British Airways aims to launch its biofuel initiative, transforming waste into jet fuel, targeting sustainable jet-fuel plant by 2014.

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In a bid to go green, British Airways has announced that come 2014, part of its fleet would be powered by biofuel derived from household trash. The airlines announced Monday that it has inked a deal with U.S. company Solena Group to set up Europe's "first sustainable jet-fuel plant." The plant will be located in east London, and it will take food and plant waste from the city's homes and businesses and convert it to bio-fuel. The airline said in a statement that the plant "will convert 500,000 tonnes of waste per year into 16 million gallons of green jet fuel through a process that offers lifecycle greenhouse gas savings of up to 95 percent compared to fossil-fuel derived jet kerosene."

The aviation fuel will be produced from gasification of the waste into a so-called syngas which is then converted by the Fischer Tropsch process into liquid fuel [Reuters].

The ...

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