If you live in Marlborough, Mass., or Israel, you need to have more plants in your diet. This has nothing to do with your health, at least not as far as your diet is concerned, but more to do with reducing fossil fuel consumption. Allow us to explain: Humans aren’t that great at digesting fibrous material from plants, like cellulose. So cellulose normally ends up as waste that, thanks to modern plumbing, ends up at a sewage treatment plant.
Now there are two companies — Qteros of Mass., and Applied CleanTech (ACT) of Israel — that claim they can extract the cellulose from sewage, ferment it (I’m trying to use scientific terms so you don’t vomit. Please hang with me.), and turn it into ethanol.
The novel part of this process is the fact that they use human waste as a feedstock for the fermentation process. The back end (one of only two puns, I promise) is probably much the same as many corn ethanol production facilities. Qteros and ACT claim that their system is quite efficient at converting cellulose into ethanol, yielding up to 135 gallons of fuel from every ton of Recyllose, which is what they call their proprietary mixture of, uh, stuff.
The business pitch? Wastewater plants that serve about 2 million customers may be able to implement this process and sell ethanol to make some money. Now that’s some green shit (that makes two puns — and not a single joke about undigested corn).
Now there are two companies — Qteros of Mass., and Applied CleanTech (ACT) of Israel — that claim they can extract the cellulose from sewage, ferment it (I’m trying to use scientific terms so you don’t vomit. Please hang with me.), and turn it into ethanol.
The novel part of this process is the fact that they use human waste as a feedstock for the fermentation process. The back end (one of only two puns, I promise) is probably much the same as many corn ethanol production facilities. Qteros and ACT claim that their system is quite efficient at converting cellulose into ethanol, yielding up to 135 gallons of fuel from every ton of Recyllose, which is what they call their proprietary mixture of, uh, stuff.
The business pitch? Wastewater plants that serve about 2 million customers may be able to implement this process and sell ethanol to make some money. Now that’s some green shit (that makes two puns — and not a single joke about undigested corn).
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