Junk In, Power Out

From PopSci.com:

A mobile bioreactor turns trash into electricity for U.S. troops. The cow is a model power generator: Each day it expels enough methane to run your home furnace for 24 hours. At Purdue University, a team of nearly two dozen researchers has built a portable device that mimics this natural metabolic process to create electricity. The "biorefinery," which is three years and $850,000 in the making, can digest ordinary kitchen scraps and other trash to produce ethanol and a composite gas and use them to fuel an electrical generator. The device was designed for the U.S. Army, which solicited researchers for ways to slash the amount of fuel it uses to run diesel generators and to reduce the output of garbage from a typical 600-person field support unit. (An Army soldier produces an average of four pounds of trash a day.) "We wanted a twofer," says Jerry Warner, founder of Defense Life Sciences, a private contractor that partnered with the Purdue scientists. "Get rid of the trash and conserve fuel at the same time."

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