Food Waste Mountains, Biofuels and the energy crunch

The food waste (and other waste) mountains at the landfills are growing, and threatening to release a lot of stinking gas into the atmosphere, with the immediate threat of smelly pollution, and the longer term threat of producing greenhouse gases that significantly contribute to climate change.

Giving over land to landfill, when it could be used for food or fuel crop production, or merely living space, exacerbates the problem. In a time when land is becoming expensive, especially in the urban centres, this leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.

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Fuel consumption has been rising with steady growth of 7% annually. Calculating what that actually means, this is a doubling time of 10 years. This means that every 10 years, our fuel consumption has doubled. Even ignoring global warming, we are dangerously close to this being disastrous.

Fuel production has began to no longer pace with that as the oil fields run low. We may have reached, or be past the point of peak oil. It can not continue, and we will begin to feel the crunch pretty soon, maybe 10 or 20 years or even less.

OPEC may sometimes produce a few thousand new barrels, and then may find that they are short a similar amount somewhere else. Oil prices have been very volatile, it is hard to see that changing any time soon.

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We could switch to clean burn coal, but even that is finite. Lowering consumption, and investing energy and time into finding real alternatives will now become the best investment we can make into a future that is not our great grandchildren, or our children, but our own lifetimes. The lack of fuel is likely to be a large problem before the rising sea levels and other effects of pollution or global warming, and needs to be addressed first, and with forethought about its effects. We need to start looking ahead, and thoroughly understanding the affects of our actions. Now is the time for change.

The world resists change, yet without it there would be no progress.
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?What can you do? What should you encourage the government and corporations to do? Here I share some of my ideas, and invite you to share yours.

I am aware that not everybody believes in these concepts, and I am really not sure there is anything worth me saying to try and convince them, but those who see what is happening need to start thinking and sharing ideas to deal with this future.

We have a mountain of waste per city, per day, of food merely decomposing into smelly greenhouse gases on the one hand. This comes from various food waste, including perfectly good food thrown out by supermarkets, restaurants and households. On the other hand, we have a fuel shortage, and are desperate for alternatives. Current growing of Biofuel crops are clearly not looking good in the balance of just getting food.

Well lets take a tip from the Japanese - they are using rice husks (they eat the rest) for biofuels.

We could go one better. By using anaerobic digestion systems on our waste products, we should be able to product fuel that is rich in calorific value. There are mountains of food - this should mean mountains of fuel.

Now the maths needs to be done on the energy it would take to process and transport it, and methods to be very efficient and keep these costs down should be considered.

Firstly - if the waste is locally produced, the biofuel should be locally refined, in each city. This will keep transport costs low.

Secondly - the more we use this technology, the greater the volume in which it is deployed and money is going into researching it, the better we should become at refining it. This is a relatively new concept given how much money, and time, and energy has gone into oil production. If just a reasonable percentage was diverted into research and production of biofuel based on food waste, we will make reasonable leaps.

The subtitle there is a loaded question, as the first thing to seriously consider is that we consume more food than we need. When I say consume, I will take it to mean no longer available for use - this includes that which is wasted.

There is a question of land used for biofuels, vs that which is used for food. As food prices are rising, and fuel prices, this question will become more pertinent.

There are some concepts which are yet to be fully explored. A number of years ago, I suggested a rather unorthodox idea of urban farms built in skyrise buildings. It turned out the concept was not original, and others had come up with similar concepts around the same time. Not only would it provide more land for food, but it would provide it right at the place of consumption, in the cities, cutting transportation and storage costs, and meaning fresher food. However, it would also cost a great deal of money to initially create such structures. So far, I have seen none in practice.

Another plan is to build many inner city rooftop terraces given to growing food or fuels. There is plenty of otherwise unused roof space. This would be cheaper than the vertical farms concept, although since the roofs belong to many different private companies, incentive would need to be provided for such things. Perhaps as the price of food goes up, that alone would be all the incentive needed to consider this.

There could also be a greater provision of public land as allotments to allow people to grow their own food. I certainly think that those in the know can at least grow a little food for themselves.

There are also vast tracts of land unused, but to be very clear, these lands also host a biodiversity otherwise unseen in the farmed or urban areas. Some land which has become very barren through overfarming could be turned over to rejuvenating crops which may in the medium to long term see it re-usable for crops. Existing agricultural land could be better farmed for good yield - and this may mean turning to unpopular, and risky farming methods involving chemicals like hormones, and GM crops.

It may be an unwelcome suggestion, but in reality, reducing the unnecessary wastage is very much an important part of ensuring shortages are kept low.

This is problem that needs plenty of thinking, and the sooner it starts to be thought about, the better the chances we are able to face it as it gets worse.

Recently, there has been discussion of the use of industrial hemp (hemp without THC - non-psychoactive) as both a biofuel and a rapidly growing food source.

Although this will help with food shortages, used as a fuel, it will not have the benefit of using the waste mountains and reducing landfill.

It is worth noting that growing industrial hemp is restricted in most countries.

Kelp is a very rapidly growing sea-weed. It is edible, and could possibly also be used as a biofuel. Even in Sci-fi the concept of kelp-burgers is fairly widespread.

Kelp grows quickly, at a rate of around half a meter today - so a large kelp plantation in the water can yield a huge biomass in a short time.

Wikipedia on kelp

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Title image, trashheap, empty glass of oil, web of food, food and money images drawn by me using Inkscape.

Power plant, and Kelp Forest images are from morguefile.com.

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