Chocolate Power

I love this kind of science - it's exactly the kind of thing science should be working towards, as well as all the blue-sky stuff. In short (from New Scientist):

Microbiologist Lynne Mackaskie and her colleagues at the University of
Birmingham in the UK have powered a fuel cell by feeding sugar-loving bacteria
chocolate-factory waste. "We wanted to see if we tipped chocolate into one end,
could we get electricity out at the other?" she says.

Electrical power from waste is exactly the kind of thing we need to start turning around the reliance on fossil fuels and our oil economy.

There is something I do always find slightly disturbing about these schemes - the sudden commodification of waste materials. Of course "one man's waste is another man's fuel" has always been the case, but one side effect of our capitalist-bent system is that as soon as a waste material becomes useful, someone's eyes light-up with pound signs and decide it should now be sold.

The article goes on to say that the chocolate waste was earmarked for landfill before this use was discovered, so if it does eventually make it to an proper industrial-scale operation I sincerely hope that it's donated rather than sold. In fact, it might even serve Cadbury to offset their own energy use by using their own waste to produce some of their leccy needs.

This has been seen before though. As one example - coal fired power stations tend to be quite dirty things, and one of the by-products going up their chimneys is Sulphur Dioxide. That's nasty stuff which contributes to acid rain so, many governments brought in legislation to help clean that up. One of the ways (apart from stopping coal-use) is to fit scrubbers to the flues. In these scrubbers, wet limestone reacts with the SO2 removing it from the gases which eventually blow away but changing the limestone, gradually, to gypsum.

Are you keeping up?

Gypsum, which is also a by-product of other industrial processes is often dumped. However it's also useful as a main constituent of plaster and plasterboard used in the building industry. The building industry decided that they should be paid for removing what was deemed waste by the power companies but they in turn decided they should charge the building industry for supplying, not waste, but a raw material. Sheesh.

More on Gypsum recycling here.