Here’s a new piece of Israel-born ingenuity. From the creator of the Arrow defense missile, we now have…Arrow garbage recycling:

The idea sounded simple enough: to treat solid waste using water. But their point of origin, says Zadik, was revolutionary. “Europe was still considering how to treat segregated trash, and assumed they could teach the public to classify it. Our point of origin was that people would never segregate trash properly. So instead of educating the public, we invented a technology that would separate the trash and recycle it, too.”

The model developed by Zadik and his partners, Yeheskel Ezair and Israel Feig, was a new animal. Trash is automatically separated according to recycling technology, using streams of water that prevent environmental damage (by virtue of the liquid environment). The natural gas produced in the process is used to produce electricity and the water, including recovered from the trash, itself is reused.

Arrow claims that its technology can turn one ton of trash into 100 cubic meters of gas, 150 kilos of plastic, 30 kilos of metal, 50 kilos of cardboard, 200 kilos of fertilizer, 30 kilos of glass and 300 liters of water. The remaining 200-250 kilos of compound materials and textile is buried, minus organic contaminants.

I like this one. Don’t build a system that relies on the public sorting through their own nasty garbage. That will not work in the real world. Instead, build a system that does all of the sorting for you, and recycles efficiently. Now, if only we can have the same sort of breakthrough in water recycling, generation and preservation (though it looks like this company also has some ideas in that area as well).