Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Just a quick follow up...


"So" I hear my imaginary readers asking "Just what are you going to with all that scrap paper and stuff if Sorpa started paying for people to recycle it?"

Simple. Just make charcoal outta it.

Charcoal is the black residue consisting of impure carbon obtained by removing water and other volatile constituents from animal and vegetation substances. Charcoal is usually produced by slow pyrolysis, the heating of wood, sugar, bone char, or other substances in the absence of oxygen (see pyrolysis, char and biochar). The resulting soft, brittle, lightweight, black, porous material resembles coal and is 50% to 95% carbon with the remainder consisting of volatile chemicals and ash.

Thank you Wikipedia!

Now, making charcoal is very polluting because those "volatile constituents" are even worse greenhouse gases then the CO2 you produce just by burning the stuff all the way through. Happily, those same volatile hydrocarbons are themselves flammable, and can be captured and used as fuel, as in the case of wood gas cars.

So you take all this biomass (old newspaper, grass clippings, scrap timber, tree cuttings, old Xmas bushes, etc), and make charcoal briquettes out of it while bottling the gas. You could like run the entire plant off of the heat produced by the incomplete combustion, say by capturing it to run a steam turbine.

"But why would anyone go through all that trouble?" I hear my fictitious readers ponder.

Because Icelanders friggin' love to BBQ! They spend a lot of money to fuel their burnt meat habit!

You could sell the briquettes to people with standard grills, and the wood gas to people with gas grills, feeding the Icelandic appetite for charred sheep flesh whilst simultaneously cutting way down on the carbon footprint of the current trade, which creates charcoal without harnessing the wood gas, then ships it in petroleum powered vehicles across the planet to be burnt here. In other words, this system would bind up Bigfoot's feet and stuff 'em into a pair of ballet slippers.

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