The U.S. Department of Defense could be the world’s single biggest institutional contributor to the global waste stream, but it appears that a change is in the works. Earlier this year, the DOD launched a new high tech recycling R&D program with the aim of mining its own trash for resources to sustain military operations in hostile environments. That’s a rather ambitious goal, considering that discarded packaging from those familiar MREs (meals, ready to eat) alone adds up to 14,000 tons annually.
The new recycling program comes under DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency often credited with inventing the Internet. DARPA is also widely credited with funding research that birthed today’s world of electronic connectivity, including Windows, the World Wide Web, Google Maps, GPS, Siri, the computer mouse, videoconferencing, and drones, among others.
The problem with recycling is that there isn’t enough of it, partly due to performance issues with materials made from recycled inputs. For that matter, the world will continue to be awash in waste until people stop wasting so much stuff, and that includes packaging used by the US military. According to DARPA, the packaging for a typical MRE contains more energy than the meal itself, all of which is currently going to waste.
All in all, military waste is a logistical, strategic, and tactical impediment in war zones, and improper waste disposal can create lasting health impacts for which the taxpayer is on the hook. It is a direct national security threat that has gone unaddressed in any coordinated, meaningful way — until now, that is. Earlier this year, DARPA launched Phase I of its new ReSource, a recycling R&D initiative, which aims to turn military waste into usable, “purified” products, including food “DARPA’s ReSource program aims to revolutionize how the military procures critical supplies on the battlefield by engineering self-contained, integrated systems that rapidly produce large quantities of supplies from feedstock collected on-site,” DARPA explains.