Trashanol: Making Fuel Out of "Trash"
Trashanol: fuel-grade ethanol made from recycled organic waste materials.
How's it done? Organic waste is broken down into cellulose and hemicellolose which goes through a proprietary digestion and fermentation process that produces ethanol. This ethanol is blended with gasoline and the end fuel is called E85, which consist of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline.
International Paper, a global paper and packaging company with manufacturing operations in North America, Europe, Latin America, Russia, Asia, and north Africa has partnered with Fiberight LLC (Maryland based), a company that creates new waste recycling options that nullify the "food vs. fuel" debate by using organic waste to produce consumer products. The former company's paper and packaging production offers up the waste, seeing that the International Paper Cedar River mill produces 1 million tons of recycled paper per year for corrugated packing from old corrugated containers, but about 5 percent of the fibers from old corrugated containers cannot be recycled, adding up to about 50,000 tons of fiber waste per year. So, Fiberight's technology turns that waste into fuel. It's an mutually profitable partnership that benefits the environment.
Technology already exist to turn grain, algae, and other biomass into ethanol, but 2008 saw the rise of grain prices worldwide, which caused a good deal of political and social unrest in developing countries that produce and export grains to developed nations.
So, successfully discovering a way to produce ethanol from waste rather than food, manufacturing it in a cost-effective way, distributing it successfully, is truly a commendable enterprise in that it protects local and global economies, the environment, and helps maintain socio-political stability.
Seeing that technology doesn't recognize geographic borders nor does it discriminate against any form of manufacturing, hopefully, other industries in other states, cities, and countries will invest in research and development to implement a similar kind of alternative energy production and consumption.
At the moment, the pilot plant in Blairstown, Iowa, is the very first trashanol producing plant in America. With all the benefits from such a form of reduce, reuse, and recycle of waste, "trash" that would have ended up either in a furnace or a landfill, it shouldn't be the only plant in this country, nor should it remain the first for long.
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