Photo: pixabay
The pleasure of flipping through a newspaper in the morning with a coffee next to you is slowly dying as most news are now more actively thrown at people via electronic devices. The fact that the newspaper also needs to be discarded after finishing it contributes now to its extinction, but some scientists discovered that these used rustling pages can be recycled into something we need the most - biofuel.
The toilet paper in your bathroom contains a rather big amount of recycled newspapers, but soon it may find a more noble cause to serve than your back end. Scientists from the Tulane University discovered a unique strain of bacteria in newspapers that can help make bio-butanol.
Led by doctor Harshad Velankar, the team refers to the new bacteria as TU-103 which they believed so far it can only be found in animal feces. Does this mean all newspapers are filled with “crap”?
Maybe, but the good news is that landfills are receiving some 323 million tons of stuff containing the TU-103 meaning a lot of bio-butanol is waiting there to be used.
Butanol, in case you know nothing about it, has an energy density quite close to gasoline, giving 29.2 MJ/L (gasoline has 32 MJ/L). Compared to other alternative fuels, butanol offers 9.6 MJ/L more than Ethanol and 13,2 more than Methanol.
Being closer to gasoline than the other fuels, an engine running on butanol will consume only around 10 percent more than when it’s using gasoline. Which is a lot better than the 40% penalty the Ethanol gives.
Led by doctor Harshad Velankar, the team refers to the new bacteria as TU-103 which they believed so far it can only be found in animal feces. Does this mean all newspapers are filled with “crap”?
Maybe, but the good news is that landfills are receiving some 323 million tons of stuff containing the TU-103 meaning a lot of bio-butanol is waiting there to be used.
Butanol, in case you know nothing about it, has an energy density quite close to gasoline, giving 29.2 MJ/L (gasoline has 32 MJ/L). Compared to other alternative fuels, butanol offers 9.6 MJ/L more than Ethanol and 13,2 more than Methanol.
Being closer to gasoline than the other fuels, an engine running on butanol will consume only around 10 percent more than when it’s using gasoline. Which is a lot better than the 40% penalty the Ethanol gives.
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