[Sustain] Fuel From Factory Animal 'Waste' Parts & Factory Fishing 'By-Catch' Rising Threat

[Eric Brooks]

Hello all,

The shift to 'waste' animal parts based biodiesel is clearly becoming 
serious. You've seen my report about the Darling rendering plant in San 
Francisco. Last week there was a report about arctic shark and other 
'by-catch' being used as biodiesel feedstock, and this week a NY Times 
report on chicken plucking remnants being turned into 'waste for fuel' 
biodiesel. See both reports below my signature.

These are not isolated incidents. The 'biodiesel' industry, seeing that 
anti agrofuel organisers are successfully turning cities like Berkeley 
and Seattle away from its obviously unsustainable plant based biofuels, 
is desperately grasping for another feedstock that it can pawn off to 
the public as 'sustainable' 'waste' 'recycling'. It is clear they've 
decided that this feedstock is 'waste' animal parts and 'by-catch' from 
the incredibly environmentally destructive factory animal farming and 
factory fishing industries.

This now makes our work to stop the local Darling animal biodiesel plant 
critically important to the entire planet; because San Francisco may 
well be the knock-out-the-keystone leverage point needed to flatly 
reject, as inherently un-sustainable, any fuels made from factory ag 
renderings and factory fishing by-catch.

In the next few weeks, I am going to start an active coalition to oppose 
factory animal and fishing based biofuels and will need co-organizers. 
Please email me one-on-one at brookse32 at aim.com if you are willing to 
attend a meeting once every two months or so to help organize against 
the alarming rise of these animal based franken-fuels.

Keep in mind, right now it is shark, chickens, pigs and cows. How long 
will it be before Japan, or some other whaling country, decides to make 
biodiesel out of whale blubber? We are rapidly and truly reverting to 
the even more planet destroying nineteenth century energy paradigm if we 
don't put a stop to this now!

Please RSVP.

Eric Brooks - brookse32 at aim.com

Here are the reports:

http://www.greendiary.com/entry/artek-plans-to-produce-biofuel-from-shark/

* ARTEK plans to produce biofuel from sharks*
Aditi Justa <http://aditij.instablogs.com/> | Jul 20 2009

Researchers at the Arctic Technology Center in Sisimiut in Western 
Greenland are on their way to producing biofuel from sharks' oily flesh. 
A lot of research and experiments are being undertaken for this purpose. 
The pilot project 
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jZYaPI6X7WN8mk_GAsM1-YGzW_ZQ> 
funded by the EU in Uummannaq will use shark's meat blended with 
wastewater and macro-algae to form a fish mince to be further used to 
produce biofuel. Thousands of Greenland sharks already lose their lives 
being trapped into the deadly nets of the anglers. Hence, it's a 
sensible way to utilize the decaying bodies.

In order to utilize these dead beasts in a better way, Joegensen will 
perform tests at the organic waste treatment plant. ARTEK's innovative 
solution will produces biofuel <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofuel> 
from sharks and other sea products, which could provide 13 percent of 
energy consumption in the village of Uummannaq.

Although it is claimed that the Greenland sharks are not in danger of 
extinction but the International Union for the Conservation of nature 
<http://www.iucn.org/> and the Danish branch of the Worldwide Fund for 
Nature do not quite agree to this. Therefore, using sharks to produce 
biofuels does not sound like a very good idea. It would rather be better 
to look for some other sustainable energy alternatives.

*The New York Times*
July 28, 2009


  A Recipe for Biodiesel, Plucked From Poultry

By HENRY FOUNTAIN 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/henry_fountain/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

Those researchers in the department of chemical and materials 
engineering at the University of Nevada 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_nevada/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
in Reno are at it again. Last year they showed the world that it was 
possible to make biodiesel 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/b/biofuels/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> 
fuel from coffee grounds. This time, it's chicken feathers.

In a paper <http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf900140e> in The 
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Mano Misra, Susanta K. 
Mohapatra and colleagues describe how they extracted fat from chicken 
feather meal and converted it into good-quality biodiesel.

Feather meal, which is commonly used as fertilizer or animal feed, is a 
byproduct of large-scale poultry production and often includes blood and 
offal. It can contain up to 11 percent fat.

The researchers extracted the fat by boiling the meal in water and 
converting it to biodiesel by a process called transesterification.

They say that there is enough feather meal produced in the United States 
alone to create about 150 million gallons of biodiesel a year. That's 
just a drop in the bucket, really, but the researchers note that most 
current production of biodiesel uses vegetable oil, and as demand for 
the fuel grows there is likely to be competition for the oil between 
food uses and fuel uses.

Thus it's important, the researchers say, to seek alternative sources 
for biodiesel production --- with the goal, as they put it, of "food for 
hunger, waste for fuel."

Copyright 2009 
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html> The New 
York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.sfgreens.org/pipermail/sustainability/attachments/20090729/4758a5ea/attachment.htm>