Have Your Bacon and Drive It Too

An anonymous reader writes "Love ham, bacon and/or sausage? Now you can share that joy with your car. Smithfield is going to turn the waste from 500,000 hogs/year into biodiesel. For those of you who don't know about biodiesel check out this site on how to make your own."

Comments

Free Beer

[Anonymous Coward]

Beer contains ethanol, a cheap clean source of energy with a very high calorie/ml ratio. Given free beer, you can solve the world's energy problems.

Biodiesel in the land of Oz

[km790816]

I have a good friend that works for the Australian Biodiesel Consultancy. They are doing similiar things.

Biodiesel is great for countries that have no domestic oil sources. It burns as efficiently and more cleanly than the stuff you get out of the ground and it's using food waste we'd have anyway.

Cool stuff!

"double edged sword"?

[Strange Ranger]

It doesn't mention the by-products of burning biodiesel, but I would think more sources of diesel-like fuel is one of the LAST things we need.

Environmental damage and pollution from livestock is a very serious problem and probably the main reason I'm "pescatarian".
But I'm far from convinced that this process of converting the waste into fuel and burning it like diesel isn't just an equal-but-different evil, or worse. A far better option would be to treat industrialized meat as the sister-evil to SUV's. AKA Ridiculous Consumption in the vast majority of cases.

Re:"double edged sword"?

[Ashurbanipal]

How much energy and resources does it take to do the conversion? Has that been factored in?

Less energy than it takes to effectively manage the waste through any other means. Seriously, the pig farmers aren't doing this because they are dancing california flower-child wannabees. They are doing it because they have a serious waste disposal problem, that is costing them titanic amounts of money, and this is a way to sell the nastiest, most volatile fraction of their waste products.

You can rant about industrialized meat all you want, but as long as an ever-increasing number of humans want to eat meat, somebody will step up to produce that meat as cheaply as possible. That's how the capitalist system works, when it does work. Managing the waste of that industry with less harmful pollution and less discarded resources is an admirable thing, as is helping to make the US more energy-efficient.

You missed something

[Spamalamadingdong]

- Biodiesel can be produced from waste vegetable oil. This helps to "close the loop", meaning that that WVO doesn't end up in a landfill.

Biodiesel can also be produced from WAF (Waste Animal Fat). Say what you will about the desirability of mass-feeding and slaughter operations; using waste fat for fuel is better than putting it in landfills.