Fuel Cell That Runs On Sewage could be shipped to a disaster area to provide energy waste and disposal @Forbes

April 12, 2012

Reposted - You may not realize it yet, but you’re living in the Golden Age of Garbage. We’re up to our necks in trash– the U.S. alone generates 249.9 million tons of municipal solid waste a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency—and much of it consists of valuable metals, polymers and other materials. It can also be expensive to haul away and store in landfills. As a result, emerging startups—sometimes with assistance and investment from multinationals like Waste Management, Total Ventures and Valero Energy–have focused on transforming “worthless” commodities into marketable substitutes for gas, plastic, chemicals and other materials.

Noteworthy trashy ideas include converting old plastic into building materials (Axion International), ethanol from garbage (Enerkem), plastic into fuel (Agylix), CO2 into fuel (LanzaTech), high-octane gas from waste (Terrabon), fertilizer from sewage (Ostara Nutrient Energy Technology) and a vacuum system for collecting trash in municipalities (Envac).

Wal Van Lierop of Chysalix Ventures says that environmental remediation is rapidly becoming a large market in clean. So instead of cleantech we have clean up tech.

Several companies have marketed anaerobic digesters for years, but most of these are immense structures that require planning and building permits. Seab’s breakthrough revolves around shrinking a digester so that it could fit into a 40-foot container and still function economically and efficiently. The modular container makes the sales cycle much easier. It also makes it portable: a Muckbuster could be shipped to a disaster area to provide an instant sewage system or a three-day street fair to eliminate food waste.

Please continue reading at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2012/03/28/a-fuel-cell-that-runs-on-food-scraps-and-sewage/