It is another symptom of how lopsided and unsustainable our agricultural practices are. The soils are becoming depleted, and we compensate by dumping loads of fertilizer on them. It is my belief that when/if we develop sustainable farming methods, we will not have billions of tons of waste that we don't know what to do with.TomSaidak wrote:much of the fertilizer is WASTED by putting too much of it in the soil - more then the soil can handle.
Much of the soil in the Great Plains is little more than a sponge into which we must pour hydrocarbon-based fertilizers in order to produce crops.
TomSaidak wrote:TDP is a pathway to energy. At 6 billion tons AG Waste, using CWT's 10% conversion (10 tons yields 1 ton of oil), you get a whopping 52% of US oil consumption.
Food Vs Fuelconverting the entire grain harvest of the US would only produce 16% of its auto fuel needs
If converting the entire US grain harvest would produce only 16% of our auto fuel needs, I am having a hard time believing that AG waste would provide 52% of the US oil consumption. You are making it sound like we have 6 billion tons of agriculture waste that gets thrown on a garbage pile and is just waiting to be turned into oil. One small problem with that. It's not. It is recycled. This is precisely the problem CWT ran into when they wanted to take the turkey guts from butterball and turn them into oil. Butterball didn't want to just give it away for free. It wasn't garbage to them, it had value that they had plans for. So CWT had to pay Butterball to get the turkey guts. And that's just with a small amount of 270 tons of turkey guts a day. Multiply that effect by 16 million. All of a sudden a large source of animal feed, fertilizers, chemicals, etc has just been removed from the system. Now you might understand why CWT never built more than 1 plant. They were in competition for the "waste", and had to outbid everyone else to get it.
of the 6 billion tons of annual waste generated in United States, approximately half of it is agricultural. Prior to mankind's industrial era, all of the waste biomass was simply recycled back into the ecosystem. With the advent of meat rendering on a large-scale, that waste became increasingly recycled in a more systematic fashion, entering the process at a much higher level, in the form of animal feed, fertilizer, and various chemicals.