Monday, April 20, 2009

Biofuels Sustainable City




How would you like to work in a restaurant where you can collect the grease and take it home. At home, you can then use the grease as fuel to run your automobile. This is exactly what numerous individuals are doing in such cities as Boston and New York, where individuals have converted their cars to run on grease biofuel. The City of San Francisco has taken this one step further and given all homeowners a chance to be a "green" homeowner by collecting their cooking grease and turning it over to the city at a monthly collection. The City of San Francisco then uses the grease as a biofuel to run its buses. Around the world, there are many efforts to develop new sustainable biofuels. One of the most interesting is a project in Hawaii to grow algae in vertical shelves to be made into biofuel, with algae being one of the most efficient sources for biofuel. Other communities are experimenting with algae/marine plant wastewater treatment plants to replace chemical based wastewater treatment plants. An added advantage of this new style wastewater treatment plants is that many algae and marine plants take up the heavy metals in the wastewater, thus reducing the amount of heavy metals and other chemicals (that normal wastewater treatment plants do not remove) from flowing into our rivers.