One of the many issues associated with livestock is the waste products. Every creature that consumes food, produces some kind of waste, and when you have large quantities of animals being raised in the confined space of many farms you get a lot of dung to deal with. Some of it gets used for fertilizer, but now the University of Georgia Engineering Dept. is teaming up with the livestock industry in Mexico to research the production of biofuels from animal waste.
The program will include exchanges of students and faculty between UGA and various Mexican universities for training and research. The intent is find cost-effective ways of integrating animal waste management and biofuel production. The result will hopefully provide a means of dealing with the huge amounts of waste that can be generated from livestock while providing additional income to farmers and producing fuel. Two of the paths that will be investigated are using the waste to grow algae for biodiesel and anaerobic digestion to produce methane (see link below).
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[Source: University of Georgia]
1. The good thing about it is that manure is full of methane, which is the king of greenhouse gasses - an order of magnitude more warming than CO2.
Posted at 9:52PM on Jun 25th 2007 by AMcA