For decades people seem to have tried gasification of waste. Either the economics didn't work out, the technology was finicky, or a combination of both. The failure of gasification comes as no surprise, as I looked into my kitchen trash bag this morning, seeing an incredible potpourri of materials, sizes, shapes, and consistencies.

Garbage is heterogeneous. It contains particles ranging in size from a grain of sand to a sofa. It contains materials ranging from road grit, metal, and glass with no energy value to plastics with a high energy value. The array of chemical compositions is almost endless, and some of these materials are literally nothing but water which will extinguish any hope for successful conversion pretty quickly.

What happens when the gasifier is fed a load of two dozen pumpkins, as I witnessed being unloaded at the Lancaster incinerator?

The solution to trash: mass-burn incineration with cogeneration of electricity and heat. It seems that most of the gasification proposals will be using the gas to generate electricity anyways, so why not skip the complicated gasification process?

British Airways apparently would like to convert trash into aircraft fuel - producing what they call "green airliner fuel". Good luck with that one, there's nothing more like running backwards up Mt. Second Law.

Let's let physics work in our favor - instead of burning oil and gas for space heating and making fuel from garbage, let's use trash for space heating and make fuel from oil and gas. If we want to be "green", we will let the airlines keep burning oil-derived fuel and we will heat our cities by burning garbage - NOT the other way around.