A Cash Cow?
May 21st 2007 10:22
Their ‘cow’, or bio-refinery as they rather more scientifically call it, is a machine that chews up waste and scraps and turns them into fuel to generate electricity. The US Army wanted something that would prevent them throwing out tons of waste each year – supposedly each soldier produces 4lbs of waste a day (!) – and it also had to be fuel-economic.
So, they researchers-cum-inventors came up with a machine that chews up the trash, and then produces enzymes to ‘digest it’ and turn it into simple sugars. These are turned into ethanol by the addition of yeast. Leftover waste – paper cups, plastic forks and so on – are squashed into pellets, and burned to produce a gas that's blended with the ethanol, and used to run a modified diesel engine.
The machine is self-contained and self-generated, but it requires an enormous amount of waste per day - 2,500 lbs of it - in order to produce enough energy to keep just three houses going. Certainly the Army comes up with the waste, but wouldn’t it also be more practical to think of ways to stop producing so much waste in the first place?
There’s more information about the workings of this machine on the Popular Science site.
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