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Cheese Waste to Run Your Car
Although some of these alternative fuel sources are yet to be explored, studies have shown that one of the unique sources, cheese waste, actually shows a lot of potential.
Cheese Waste to Run Your Car
Chocolate, fat, used diapers, Styrofoam cups – almost everything are being turned into fuel nowadays. Although some of these alternative fuel sources are yet to be explored, studies have shown that one of the unique sources, cheese waste, actually shows a lot of potential.
According to some scientists in Wisconsin, you could soon be filling up your car’s tank with biodiesel sourced from cheese. An ongoing project revolves around producing ethanol from cheese waste or whey that gets left behind after cheese is made. Ethanol will then be mixed with gasoline to create a biofuel. Although this form of biofuel will still need gasoline, your regular gasoline usage will go a longer way now that biofuel is here to help.
As an alternative energy source, the whey from cheese waste seems promising for many reasons. First, it helps cheese plants deal with the leftover cheese waste. Although whey is a popularly used by-product of cheese and is sometimes used in making candies and nutrition bars, smaller cheese plants have difficulty disposing of them in an affordable way. In fact, some cheese plants were put out of business merely because of the huge disposal costs of whey. Now, they have the much-needed solution and they can even use the produced biofuel for their own operations.
A company in Stratford called Grand Meadow Energy is currently researching and developing this said technology under the leadership of Joe Van Groll. The project also involves another separate cheese plant where Van Groll produces around 6 million gallons of ethanol annually. According to Van Groll, the technology that produces biodiesel from whey is now ready to be sold to those interested. Although the technology is not feasible for the general public who do not have their hands on cheese waste, it will prove to be extremely helpful for cheese plants who have a lot of it to go around and to deal with.
Van Groll also gave more details about the process he used. First, the whey left over from production is gathered, and the sugar water content extracted from it. This process, however, can also be used to produce ethanol from other possible organic sources.
This technology is also being used in other countries such as Germany and New Zealand. New Zealand, a country naturally rich in dairy, actually uses whey to produce about 50% of its total ethanol supply. In Germany, $27 million has so far been invested into an ethanol-producing whey plant. California has started raising funds for the same cause.
However, there are challenges hovering for this particular technology as the price of whey has begun to rise. Nonetheless, the cost of producing ethanol using cheese waste is still more affordable than producing ethanol from corn, which is a more commonly used biodiesel source. In fact, the benefits continue to add up. Some studies have shown that whey could even be used to produce biodegradable plastics that could replace the plastics causing much of the havoc in the environment.
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