A small Quebec company says it's poised to become the first in the world to turn garbage into fuel for vehicles.

Enerkem Inc., a Montreal-based company, has been working for three decades on technology that can produce gas from heaps of trash.

Company co-founder and executive director Vincent Chornet said the process is as basic as "garbage in, ethanol out, ethanol in your car."

"There's hydrogen in our trash. There's carbon. There's very nice molecules that we are putting in landfills," Chornet said.

Ethanol producers estimate that there's enough of garbage, minus the recyclable materials, which are removed, to fuel three million cars a year.

This spring, Enerkem announced it would be pairing with Canada's largest Ethanol producer, GreenField Ethanol, to make the ethanol on a commercial scale.

Ethanol refers to any fuel made from grains such as corn and wheat, or from cellulose found in a variety of plants and other biomass.

Process could reduce reliance on food crops

Toronto-based GreenField touts the fuel as the way of the future.

"The ability to take something that was already processed as waste and transform it into an energy candidate is of interest to urban areas around the world," said Robert Gallant, GreenField Ethanol president and CEO.

Enerkem plans to build its first big commercial plant near Sherbrooke to begin making ethanol from leftover wood and later municipal waste.

The use of ethanol as an alternative to fossil fuels for vehicles is the cornerstone of the federal government's environmental policy, but has come under attack in recent weeks due to the rising price of food staples used for biofuels such as corn.

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank have urged caution in promoting biofuels. Such warnings have slowed the passage of Canada's bill C-33, which proposes to make all gasoline for vehicle use five per cent renewable fuel by 2010.

The scarcity of grains such as wheat and corn could be a boon for Enerkem.