posted by admin on Jan 19

Biofuels hit hard criticism when they were competing with human crops, but things might change…..

People are starting to look at waste materials and invasive plants as potential sources of biofuel – rather than using what could have been food for humans.

With the world population soaring and food shortages the world over – it was time to move biofuels forward so to utilise a more sustainable and non-competitive source – and 2 such examples have recently been publicised.

Bracken:
This plant grows virtually everywhere.  Whether it’s in open fields, heathlands, moorlands and mountains.  It is also a worldwide genera and has the widest distribution of any other fern.

Nobody likes it growing on their land (apart from National Parks) as it is very dominant in the landscape and nothing really eats it either (as it is carcinogenic) – so it just spreads across a landscape stealing the light from any other young or low-lying plants.  And a it won’t let grass grow beneath it – the mountains sides and valleys can’t be used for grazing as there is nothing for the sheep or cattle to eat and farmers pay a lot of money to get it cut and removed from their land every year as it is.

It turns the land into a very green wasteland in terms of human needs – and at one time the British Government had an eradication program in place to deal with it’s excessive growth!

However, it is actually because it grows itself very well, and grows back every year - even if cut back when fully grown, it seems like the perfect crop to start working on for sustainable fuels.

The only problem is of course that it usually grows in places that are not easy to get to with modern farm machinery.

Old Yeast:
We all know that there is always going to be whisky in Scotland – so what can we do with all the natural waste materials?

As with the bracken – waste materials from whisky plants costs a lot of money to dispose of – so why not find a way to either use that waste, or find a way to sell it as a product.

Distillery waste (yeasty materials) will be fed into an anaerobic digester to create methane gas – a biogas.  The idea is that if all the distilleries in the area do this – they could power themselves without the need to draw on other energy sources from elsewhere. 

I know it isn’t going to power homes and other businesses – or the whole country, but if these large commercial buildings can fully power themselves using their own waste products, then less energy will have to be created from other sources and shipped or piped to them.

The Future:
Can you imagine if warehouses could generate their own energy from all the waste cardboard they get through, or supermarkets could create biogas from all the food they throw away being bio-digested. 

Even huge offices and sky-scrapers could be creating biogas from all the waste created by their workers – basically, they would be powering themselves!

New technologies are allowing smaller scale operations which were just not viable in the past – they just were not cost effective before we understood how our waste was affecting the environment.  But now companies have to be more environmentally responsible and to also pay to process and dispose of their own waste – they are starting to think about spending that money on alternative services – green services.

And, there must still be plenty of waste products that could be used for fuel or energy – just waiting to be discovered.  Certain things are always going to be needed by people – so why not use the left-overs constructively?