Friday, May 05, 2006

Running on Turkeys

In my new book, Drunk with Wonder: Awakening to the God Within, I don’t focus a lot of attention on the environment. Not because of disinterest, mind you, rather that my goal in the book is to assist those who are ready to move into a place of greater clarity, peace, purpose with passion and a strong sense of play. It seems abundantly clear that we need to be able to think clearly before we can begin making choices that truly support life in all its myriad forms, including the environment.

For example, people who are awake to their connection with the Earth do not tend to trash it. Most of us would not litter our living space, yet somehow millions of tons of trash get dumped on our roads every year. Our country, not to mention the rest of the world, still tosses billions of tons of “waste” into landfills as well.

It turns out (surprise, surprise!) that the vast majority of this material is recyclable in one form or another. Take our annual waste stream of some 15,000,000 scrapped cars (please!). Almost every shred of metal is already pulled out and reused, but that still leaves roughly 4.5 million tons of “shredder residue” (nice euphemism, huh?) that winds up being dumped in landfills.


The good news in all this is that a company called Changing World Technologies has figured out how to turn this unholy mess of shredder residue, which includes at least three dozen kinds of plastic, as well as treated fabrics, rubber and nylon, into high-grade “light” oil that can be used to run an electric generating plant. It can also easily be refined into gasoline. And this process uses only 15% of the available energy. As an extra bonus, all PCBs and dioxins are broken down into substances that can be used in other industrial processes. No PCBs, no dioxins, no emissions. How cool is that?

Using the same technology, Changing World Technologies has built a full-scale conversion plant in Carthage, Missouri, where they are already processing thousands of tons of turkey offal and pig fat daily. This process, which uses a combination of high pressure and heat, turns out thousands of gallons of this same high-grade fuel oil. This awful offal used to be dumped in landfills, and billions of tons still are. But this company has invented a solution that works, one that is already making a difference in helping our beloved Mother Earth while developing renewable sources of fuel. Truly what I call a win-win.


Source: Discover Magazine, April 2006, “Anything into Oil” by Brad Lemly.

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