Turning giblets into biofuel
US scientists find new source of biodiesel in poultry wasteAmericans eat their own weight in fried chicken every week. Well, the wings, breasts, thighs and drumsticks anyway. The rest turns into something they politely call 'chicken feather meal' and disposing of 5 billion kilos of it a year isn't easy, even if it is useful for animal feedlot fodder and fertiliser.
The American Chemical Society's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry reports that Professor Mano Misra and his team from the University of Nevada have found a means of turning something they call 'chicken feather meal' – but is in fact a mix of the feathers, blood and guts making up most of the 5 billion kilos of poultry waste the nation generates each year – into biodiesel.
More than 10 per cent of feather meal is fat, giving it the potential to expand the nation's biofuel stocks by up to 680 megalitres a year. Separating the fat is a simple enough business – you simply add water and boil it out.
The quantities of feather meal generated by the poultry industry worldwide could make more than 2.5 gigalitres a year, the team estimates.
There's a tidy side-effect, too: getting rid of the fat improves the quality of the animal fodder and the fertiliser products.
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