Posted on 03/11/2008 12:13:11 PM PDT by Red Badger
Bump
Actually, I understand that goats are very effective against kudzu.
It causes seals and gaskets to deteriorate faster than with gasoline.
I have often looked at the mountain our landfill has made, and thought of the billions of dollars that lay waiting there for someone to mine. A process like this, that would be able to float all the bio-waste out in a usable form is a really good first step.
There are literally billions of tons buried landfill waste, mostly plastics from the last 70 years of overpackaged, cheap, disposable trinkets and gadgets we’ve produced. All that plastic can be turned into diesel fuel using the thermal depolymerization process......
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
I'm not sure it was bogus, I think they just hadn't figured out how to do it on a large scale.
Ha! I love that picture! When I was visiting friends in Tokyo in 2005, we saw kudzu growing up the walls of highway embankments, and on everything out in the country. Looked like back home, in MS, where if something didn’t move for a couple of hours, kudzu started growing on it.
Convince the govt. agency in charge of ethanol $$$ allocation that whatever product or food source you are working on can be converted into Ethanol then thats a fast track to the Govt. $$$ earmarked for ethanol production.........
I predict in 10 years, oil to gasoline will be replaced by something else, maybe blogs-—>gas or grass-—>gas, but whatever it is, it will end our dependency on foreign oil.
Ethazyme/U of MD/ethanol ping.
KUDZU, yes, the roots are the source of a very good starch like arrowroot which is used in Japan. It makes nice jell type desserts. At Whole Foods Market, it was selling for almost $1 per oz. So the roots could certainly be used for ethanol production perhaps in the way that corn is used. And all that green stuff, great for cellulosic ethanol. Incidentally, the fibers in Kudzu vines can be used for cloth manufacture. In fact if I had a lot of land overrun by Kudzu I would check out the potential economic value. The refining processes for food and fiber are not that complex.
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