In the USA, they are looking for ways to turn garbage into food. Yesterday, December 2, Popular Science magazine reported that the Agency for Advanced Defense Projects (DARPA) of the US Department of Defense is developing the ReSource project.
DARPA has taken care of environmental friendliness and intends to reduce the amount of garbage that troops leave behind during deployment. In addition to "lying on the surface" ideas with edible or biodegradable packaging, researchers are looking for unusual ways to transform plastic garbage into something useful.
American soldiers burn garbage in Afghanistan
Image source: popsci.com
The ReSource project has been in existence since 2019 and unites the University of Iowa, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan Technological University, a number of government organizations and the private company Battelle. As part of the first phase, DARPA contractors studied the conceptual possibilities of garbage conversion. Now the project is moving to the second stage, where developers will have to prove the viability of their ideas.
One of the most interesting ideas was the transformation of plastic into edible protein, as well as into a weapon lubricant. It is planned to achieve this with the help of special installations that decompose plastic at the molecular level, including using microorganisms. As they write in Popular Science, even if soldiers refuse to eat protein from plastic, such processing will benefit the environment in any case.
