2009: A Year in Waste

When it comes to energy there’s just something fascinating about waste products. Sure, the material’s almost always gross, but the idea of using garbage that would otherwise lay in piles or puddles makes great economic and environmental sense. Vancouver, for example, has plans to build six new waste-to-energy plants, dealing with the problems of residential garbage burning and reduced landfill capacity in one fell swoop.

So, in the spirit of sifting through piles for the best and brightest ideas, here’s a review of some of the icky, useful subjects that Flow waded through in 2009.

Banana peels

As it turns out, banana peels aren’t just for slapstick anymore. Like other cellulosic materials, bananas’ fibrous peels aren’t worth eating, which makes them a perfect source of biomass. The skins and leaves are mashed into a pulp and mixed with saw dust, which eventually hardens into bricks that can be burned as fuel.

Mountain pine beetle-killed wood

With mountain pine beetles spreading as fast as warmer winters will let them, the amount of wood destroyed by their infestation is growing. But while wood that’s been chomped on by the beetle’s larvae is useless as building material, it can still be packed into dense pellets for use as fuel. In fact, British Columbia has already integrated these wood pellets into its energy strategy through the BC Bioenergy Strategy.

Lumber mills

There are several ways to use the waste from lumber mills to create biofuels, from extract sugars from waste wood that can eventually be refined into ethanol, to the less tested bio-butanol, which has a more difficult refining process. Either way, in a country where “timber” is practically as important a phrase as “hello,” there’s no sense in letting wood waste go, well, to waste.

Manure

Manure, droppings or plain ol’ poop: call it what you will, but in the right hands the brown stuff is practically golden. Stories about the use of animal droppings as a fuel source were always cropping up in 2009, from a German town using its cows’ manure to produce biogas to chicken droppings as a source of heat to burning the methane from pig manure to produce electricity, no source is to smelly to be useful.

Shrimp shells

It takes a catalytic agent to turn biomass like canola oil into viable biofuel. As it turns out, an ideal source for that catalyst might be the chitinous shells of shrimp, which can not only increase the efficiency of biofuel production but, unlike other catalysts, is reusable. Hand it to researchers in Wuhan, China for turning a cocktail appetizer into a cleaner source of energy.

Finnish fish

All right, they don’t technically have to Finnish fish, but scientists in Finland are looking at the possibilities of fish waste in biodiesel. Between using fish’s chopped-off bits as an energy source or oceanic pollution, which would you choose?

Coffee grounds

Have you ever spilled a hot drink and watched a dark stain ruin the page you’d been reading? As it turns out, coffee’s (or tea’s) staining power can actually work to your advantage in a refillable ink cartridge fed by old grounds.

Heating and Cooling from Mother Earth

Imagine tapping into a limitless source of energy for heating and cooling. It’s possible and becomingly increasingly probable. And with geothermal heat relying solely on the constant temperature of the earth, Mother Nature herself could not have conceived of a greener energy source.

But at a cost of roughly 5 times that of a conventional gas furnace, the question (152KB PDF) is whether the technology pays off, both for consumers and the environment.

The technology works by recovering heat in winter months when the ground temperature is warmer than the air above it. A pump circulates a liquid refrigerant through pipes in the ground and back to a heat exchanger that recovers the heat. In the summer, the process is reversed. The heat pump delivers heat into the relatively cool ground, effectively cooling the building.

The pay-off depends on your heating and cooling costs. Estimates range from US$400 to $1,400 per year with households seeing between a 35% and 70% reduction in heating and cooling costs. Factors that impact the feasibility include the energy efficiency of the current system, geographic location, and the cost of the electricity needed to power the heat pump.

Geothermal skeptics point to the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the electricity needed to power the system. In areas where electricity is produced by coal plants, critics argue the switch would increase greenhouse gas emissions. That is because switching from a low greenhouse gas intensive fuel like natural gas to geothermal relies on a high-emitting source for electricity.

With limitless energy stored in the earth, maybe all geothermal heat needs is a helping hand from the sun.