Put In Beer and Pop, Get Ethanol – Example of Canada’s Newest Waste Recycling Plant

By Ovidiu Sandru, The Green Optimistic | link to original article

A plant that will eat up waste pop soda and beer and will output ethanol good for pouring in fuel tanks will be set up by the end of February in Atlantic Canada.

The $500,000 pilot plant is part of a project led by New Brunswick Community College’s bioenergy and bioproducts applied research and technology facility in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, located near the Maine border.

The project will use Milco Industries’ waste pop and beer for a trial. The company usually drops those in landfills and pays between $100,000 and $200,000 for disposal. With the ethanol plant installed, they will produce between 250,000 to 500,000 gallons of ethanol yearly… only from recycled waste!

If everything goes as scheduled, Milco Industries will even acquire a larger-scale ethanol plant for their own internal use. The test one will be moved somewhere else, to see what else the thing could « eat » to generate energy.

« What sort of changes can we make to this initial pilot plant that we’re going to put up, to make it so it can operate economically at a small scale, » Kevin Shiell, scientific director for New Brunswick Community College asked. « This may be too small, but maybe a million liter plant we can actually get it so that it is feasible. »

Ethanol is cleaner than fossil fuels because it burns cleaner and because, if made from renewable resources such as waste organic products, the net CO2 emission is zero. If successful, this kind of plant should be taken as an example by waste recycling companies and landfill owners to reduce the formation of methane and other greenhouse gases. Instead, the energy could be used to provide useful power.