Can you remember the scene in Back to the Future where ‘crazy’ Doc Brown feeds his time-travelling car bits of rubbish – a banana skin, some beer – while Marty and his girlfriend stand by, wide-eyed? Remember how far away 2015 seemed and how bizarre the futuristic technology was? Well, it’s taken a while (that was the ’80s, after all), but it seems that airlines are catching up with the future.

Last year, British Airways (BA) announced a venture with US-based bioenergy company Solena to produce biofuel. What was special was that BA claimed that the 16 million gallons of biojet fuel Solena would produce would come from 500,000 tonnes of food scraps and other rubbish, such as garden, agricultural and industrial waste.(Only a small percentage of BA’s total fuel consumption, perhaps, but a start.) Dr Robert Do, CEO of Solena, said: “The… BioJetFuel project will efficiently convert biomass into clean renewable fuels and electricity and is completely carbon neutral.”

A year on, and Solena has announced a similar deal with Qantas with another in the pipeline in the US, while BA is in discussion with its preferred bidder after assessing 60 London locations; construction of the 15-acre site should begin in 2012 and will be the first.

Yet, although some biofuels have been certified for use in a 50 per cent blend with conventional jet fuel since 2009, concerns exist about the lower energy content compared to fossil fuels and the Ministry of Defence body, DStan, is yet to grant approval for the proposed food waste fuel. BA, however, says it is confident it will have by the time the plant is built in 2014 – it says it is so certain that it has signed a letter of intent to purchase all the fuel produced by the plant.

And although creating biofuel from waste doesn’t present issues of change of land use or drive up food prices as other biofuels can, securing enough biomass could pose a problem. As yet, the origin of the food waste remains unclear and it is suspected that it will come from commercial and industrial, rather than household waste. Solena’s PR company was unable to comment on the matter at the time of writing as it was under a ‘communication lockdown’; according to BA, however, it is “liaising with the relevant local authorities over the plans”, but there are no specifics as yet.

Because of this doubt over the provenance of the waste, environmental groups are loath to praise the plans. Friends of the Earth’s Becky Slater comments: “The most climate-friendly way of dealing with waste is to prevent it in the first place. Generating energy from any unavoidable, unrecyclable biowaste can be a good idea as long as it doesn’t create a demand for waste and the right processes are used... British Airways’ plans to produce aviation jet fuel from waste won’t necessarily be good for the environment, [but has] the potential to offer options for dealing with waste that cannot be avoided or recycled.”

The possibilities do sound intriguing, though. The process sees biomass fed into a gasifier, and the resultant BioSynGas is then converted into biofuels using technology based on the Fischer-Tropsch process, a set of chemical reactions that convert carbon monoxide and hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbons. The resultant tail gas can be used to produce electricity (BA projects 20 megawatts for the London plant), and the solid slag used as aggregate.

Urgency to develop alternative fuels comes from the imminent inclusion of aviation in the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) from 2012. All airlines with operations to, from and within the EU fall under the scope of the new directive, which initially caps EU-wide aviation emissions at 97 per cent of average annual emissions for 2004-2006.

Airline trade body IATA, meanwhile, has called for 10 per cent of jet fuel to come from sources other than crude oil by 2017 and 50 per cent reductions in carbon emissions by 2050. To this end, IATA has identified biofuels ‘as excellent candidates that will have minimum impact on airline operations [requiring] no… change in engine architecture, fuel infrastructure, or handling’.

If food waste could provide the feedstock, it might offer a viable alternative to landfill. But for now, it’s a case of watch this space.