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To: Bill Jackson who wrote (70474)	1/4/1999 11:59:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

OT - OT - OT Use of cellulose as feedstock I am aware of work years ago in Finland where newspaper + urea were used as cattle feed and at New Mexico State University where ground up classified Los Alamos paper + pig excrement were used successfully (if producing beef from pig shit can be considered an aesthetic success) in fattening cattle. If these have been since commercially successful, I haven't heard. The process and capital costs required for converting potentially nutritious wastes into actual break-even products are not viable in the U.S. where waste disposal is relatively cheap compared to Europe and Japan. The pig farmers in North Carolina are creating an environmental disaster -- the rivers of the Eastern third of the State have the appearance of a well-used toilet bowl. Not very beautiful (except on the Coast) when not ruined , but truly fitting today as a place for Jesse Helms to represent. And this is a State with North Carolina State University and RTI? Shameful. I know that high-percentage recovery of nutrients from waste can be done economically, if we credit and debit the process with all of the savings as well as all costs. For the system to be viable all polluters will have to pay the full cost of disposal of wastes -- and this means forbidding cheap underpriceed disposal (dumping and shipping waste to poor countries) and mandating progressing rising disposal charges. The German packaging and automobile recycling program is costly, but when everyone is able to optimize their costs given these requirements I am confident it can make. We have nothing like this in US. Rather we subsidize false substitutes -- like alcohol -- that take as much or more energy in total to produce and use. The problem is that ICE automobiles operate at less than 6 per cent efficiency efficiency. Messing around with trade offs within the 6% can never accomplish anything dramatic. As for making something useful out of vegetable waste, nearly all dying primary photosynthesizing biomass -- grass, weeds, crops, and trees, kelp, algae, -- decay unused by man (no crime there!) -- dying biomass consumers -- like bacteria, yeasts, molds, fungi, termites, insects -- are largely unused by man (okay, mushrooms and some fish, moluscs, crabs). In the long run (when we are all dead) it will be possible to divert some of this waste into useful, even edible products. We burn 90-95% of the biomass in clearing Brazilian rainforest, and the only useful output is smoke, CO2, ashes (few minerals like potash), and water vapor. When we cleared the U.S. southeast we got plenty firewood. Thanks for the inputs.