Biotech

You don’t like milk? Or have lactose intolerant? Don’t throw your milk away. It could be useful for your car. A research in Japan invents technology for converting milk into bio-fuel.

Nowadays many of schoolchildren throw their milk and prefer sodas. And they were Masayuki Onodera, an associate professor of applied chemistry and biotechnology at Nigata Institute of Technology, with his team, who has been plagued recently by an abundance of discarded milk.

Quoted from this site :

The professor and his colleagues began their two-step conversion process by brewing a batch of sugar-spiked solution mimicking the bacteria-friendly confines of wastewater. Their small bioreactor relied on heat-loving microbes to digest the sludge in the absence of oxygen at a toasty 131 degrees Fahrenheit, approximating the conditions within some landfills and creating methane as well as carbon dioxide (scientists consider the carbon dioxide release “carbon-neutral” because its escape into the atmosphere is balanced by what had been taken in during photosynthesis by the grass or corn that fed the dairy cows).

Onodera’s team added a portion of the digested glop to a second container filled with rancid milk. When the solution was starved of oxygen and kept at a relatively neutral pH, it yielded eight times its own volume in biogas over a one-week period. Half the captured biogas was hydrogen, the other half carbon dioxide. By periodically replacing part of the bacteria-laden sludge with milk and making sure the solution remained at the right pH, Onodera found that the system continuously produced biogas until he stopped it 100 days later. By then, the solution was yielding more than five times its own volume in biogas every two days.

So now, even cars could drink milk.

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