Monday, December 05, 2005

Mean Green ?

This piece caught my attention today. Not sure what to say!

Mean Green BioFuels' Technologies
-- Oil Recovery from Poultry and Livestock Wastewater Sludge
About 100 million pigs, 35 million cattle, 1.6 billion
turkeys, and 8 billion chickens are slaughtered and processed
each year in the United States. The USDA requires facilities
that process these meats to use large volumes of clean water
to continuously rinse the meats as they are cut and packaged.
The derivative large volumes of water contain extremely high
levels of protein and fat. These nutrients are removed from
the wastewater using conventional but highly efficient
wastewater processing methods. This results in a cleaned
wastewater and a concentrated sludge, which is called
Dissolved Air Flotation ("DAF") sludge. The poultry industry
alone generates in excess of 2.5 billion pounds or more than
63,000 tanker loads per year of DAF sludge. The conventional
practice in the industry is to transport and dispose DAF
sludge through land application.

Mean Green's sister company, GreenShift Industrial Design
Corporation ("GIDC"), has a proprietary DAF sludge processing
technology that effectively reduces the volume of DAF sludge
by 80% while recovering the majority of the animal fats
contained in the sludge. This fat can be cost-effectively
converted into biodiesel fuel.

GIDC intends to install its DAF processing systems at
qualified processing facilities for no up front cost in return
for fixed annuities equal to a discount to their current gross
disposal costs and GIDC's agreement to purchase the refined
fats extracted from the DAF sludge. GIDC will then sell these
fats to Mean Green for conversion into biodiesel. GIDC
estimates that the benefit of its technology for an average
sized meat processing facility will be about $400,000 per
year.

Read the entire article here

Quote of the day (via Quote Garden)
"I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy.... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.~Sir George Porter, quoted in The Observer, 26 August 1973"

3 comments:

Jennifer said...

I have read about this! It’s definitely a promising alternative to oil, although as a vegetarian I wish the sludge wasn’t being created in the first place. But I don’t foresee a shutdown of the meat industry any time soon, so putting DAF to use is a great idea, particularly when it has the potential to curb the depletion of natural resources.

Riot said...

I agree. Putting DAF to use is better than wasting it. But I just wonder about the huge amount of energy and resources that go into meat industry in the first place.

silverine said...

Very interesting. After all what is crude oil if not fat of the earth. :)