A clean energy breakthrough reported by PhysOrg sounds like a reenactment of the final scene of the 1985 hit movie Back to the Future: lovable, bumbling Doc Everett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) rushes back to the present from 2015 to spirit Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) to the future to tend to an emergency involving the family he’s not yet raised.
But first, before embarking, Doc announces that he needs fuel. After rummaging through a curbside trash can, he selects a banana peel, a beer can, and other trash which he drops into a hysterically branded Mr. Fusion on board power generator, and then off they go.
Henry Daniell from the University of Central Florida has come up with an innovation that brings us astonishingly close to that comic gag, then so seemingly far flung as to be funny, becoming reality. Rather than nuclear fusion technology at the center however, Daniell’s development turns such trash as old newspapers and food scraps into ethanol.
With the support of funding from the US Department of Agriculture, the new procedure relies upon plant-based enzymes to biochemically break down a wide variety of wastes into sugars that may then be distilled into ethanol. The procedure is also potentially applicable to a variety of non-food crops that could be grown for energy purposes such as straw and switchgrass. But our organic waste stream by itself is a vast, untapped resource. Daniell tells PhysOrg that just in Florida, and strictly from the state’s discarded orange peels, some 200 million gallons of ethanol could be produced.
Additional research into the technology will be required to determine the feasibility of transforming the concept from laboratory setting to commercial scale operations, but so far, those in the field are reportedly viewing Daniell’s development with optimism and encouragement. With time and effort, we just might be able to turn an old pithy yarn upside down by reminding one another that waste makes haste.
Photo courtesy of Kevin Abato via Wikimedia Commons.
