Thanks David. The story's been around for a few weeks though. The study was published on June 25, I picked it up on July 1, and there have been quite a few news reports since. Many of them also have the word "green" in the headline, or at least in the copy somewhere high up. Which is why I didn't post it here, I don't think it's very green.
We concluded here long ago that all biodiesel or biofuel is not the same, and not necessarily a "good thing", or even "green". A prophetic message eight years ago from Steve Spence: >From: "steve spence" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 05:52:44 -0400 >Subject: Re: [biofuel] Support Grows for Corn-Based Fuel Despite Critics > >I have a niggling feeling that 10 years from now, the >environmentalists will be fighting the ethanol industry tooth and >nail. Anything can be done badly, and I expect the ADM's of the >world will be successful in turning a clean renewable resource into >a dirty unsustainable one... It happened sooner than he thought. In this case of the feather meal (hydrolysed feathers, blood and offal), the image above the abstract is clear enough: Broiler > Meat > Waste > Cattle feed > Biodiesel. The report says: "Given the amount of feather meal produced by the poultry industry, it is estimated that this process can create 150-200 million gallons of biodiesel in the United States and 593.2 million gallons worldwide..." And so on. The poultry industry. It just slops a bit of greenwash over the likes of Tysons and Perdue and what they do, but what they do is CAFOs, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, ie factory "farms", and they're an unhygienic, unhealthy, environmentally filthy, brutal and wholly unnecessary atrocity. There's nothing good about them, there's no fixing them, they have to be eradicated, and it can't be too soon. "And I'll stand on your grave til I'm sure that you're dead," as Bob Dylan put it (Masters of War, 1963). There's arguably a case for a technology that might help remediate some of the damage CAFOs cause in the meantime, but this study isn't angled that way, it assumes business-as-usual, and I can't see what damage it might remediate anyway. The stuff isn't being "wasted" now, it's used for cattlefeed (more CAFOs) and "fertilizer" - actually as an "organic fertilizer" (sic), "all-natural" and so on. That it ain't. <http://www.organicgardeninfo.com/feather-meal.html> The study doesn't even mention the option of using the biodiesel to defray the high input of fossil fuels that's found at every step of the industrial food production system, just the usual mantra of "reducing the demand for foreign oil" in general. Not much different from the turkey waste biodiesel study that got similar publicity a couple of years ago: <http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/07/17/turning-municipal-waste-in-to-biofuel/> However... <http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/11/27/missouri-biofuel-plant-smelling-up-the-air-again/> Missouri biofuel plant smelling up the air again :-( I said CAFOs are unhygienic and unhealthy, for at least two reasons, both of which you and I discussed here a few months ago, if you recall, when we were talking about swine flu and scare-mongering: <http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg74133.html> CAFOs are the breeding ground of antibiotic-resistant "super-bugs" like MRSA: "Factory farms are still feeding livestock megadoses of antibiotics, especially in the US, 40 years after the Swann Committee in the UK recommended that antibiotics used to treat people should not be fed to animals because of the danger of producing resistant bacteria. Which has since happened with Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), for starters"... (previous message). They're also the breeding ground for highly pathogenic viruses, in much the same way that it took the frightful conditions in the World War 1 trenches to turn what was at first a mild form of the flu into the worldwide killer of the 1918 pandemic. For more on factory farms and viruses see: [Biofuel] Free-range poultry and bird flu Keith Addison Wed, 06 May 2009 <http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg74134.html> I don't think the biodiesel from feather meal technique is something that could be applied on-farm (not on a real farm, that is) or at the local level. Not Appropriate Technology, IMHO. Best Keith ><http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/jf900140e> > >d. >-- >David William House _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
