You already know that Americans eat a lot of chicken, but what are we doing with the 11 billion pounds of poultry waste we produce? Scientists from the University of Nevada have developed a new process to turn some of it into biodiesel.
Professor Mano Misra and his team at the University of Nevada took chicken feather meal, extracted fat from it at high temperatures, and turned that into biodiesel. Usually the meal--an appetizing mixture of feathers, blood, and innards--is used for nitrogen-rich fertilizer and animal feed. By removing the fat for biodiesel first, the researchers say that the leftovers are even more valuable for feed and fertilizer.
Based on America's collective appetite for chicken, the researchers estimate in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that the meal has the potential to produce 153 million gallons of biodiesel annually, 593 million globally. It's a drop in the barrel compared to the amount of crude oil we import daily, but if we're going to eat so much chicken we might as well use every last piece.
Photo Credit: Noël Zia Lee.
Tags: Alternative Fuels, Food Sources, Green Science, Green Tech
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