manure

It’s lunchtime, baby. Panda Garden. Porky goodness. Mooshu style.

The “other white meat” in your takeout container falls behind beef and chicken in American consumption, but we do pig out on pig—on average, each of us consumes 51 pounds of Wilbur annually. That translates to big impact on our water and air.

A new study released yesterday goes into detail on using pig manure for biofuel. The study, published in the journal Fuel, said the pig-manure based biofuel is not yet ready for use, but it is getting very close. A strange, but potentially helpful, way to reduce your carbon footprint.

We recently wrote about the world’s first renewable gasoline, made from algae, which is carbon neutral and can be pumped directly into your gas tank, but an even more interesting source of biofuel, which after refining could power many a tractor or car, is coming from pigs. More specifically, from the back ends of pigs.

You know that times are changing when farmers look to manure as a valuable commodity. Pretty soon, manure from a herd may be more profitable than the beef itself. Manufactured fertilizers has tripled in price in the last year, driving farmers to look for alternatives.

The Santa Fe Biogas project, in its initial stages, was simply a long list of concerns communicated in Women’s Group meetings: “How can we avoid buying expensive tanks of gas and inhaling smoke in the kitchen?”

Green-trust is a offgrid non-profit renewable energy and sustainability research center, specializing in green fuels such as biodiesel, ethanol, and biodigested methane.One of our Partners was Al Rutan, commonly known as "the Methane Man", and a long time researcher of Bio-methane and renewable energy. After he died, we dedicated ourselves to making sure his research stayed available. We converted his video tapes to digital, reproduced his articles, and added some spreadsheet forecast tools.

For ages, cow’s excreta traditionally have been used as manure in the fields, but they are also a source of viable energy- bio gas, which can reduce greenhouse emissions, significantly.

With growing populations and diminishing reserves of clean water, some serious changes to the way we handle sewage need to occur. The government’s answer is to throw billions of dollars at it, but The Humanure Handbook offers many ideas to help people take responsibility for their own waste