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Bio-Ethanol From Rubbish
An inventor from Westerham claims to have developed a process of making bio-ethanol from domestic waste. View Transcript
View Synopsis
TOM CHOWN reports.
An inventor from Westerham near Sevenoaks claims to have developed a method of converting our domestic waste into a limitless energy resource. This prototype is the first stage of the process. The shredded waste is broken down as it travels the length of the rotating cylinder by injecting it with steam at 160˚C.
PHILIP HALL, Managing Director, Reclaim Resources: 'After the waste has gone through the vantage waste processor we're left then with a more fibrous product; it certainly has pieces of plastic and bits of metal but it's been shredded and sanitized, reduced in volume. This will then go through to an automatic sorting whereby all the plastic will be taken out and any metals that may be there. We're really interested in what's left, which is the biomass, which is the flour, the food stuff, the cardboard, that sort of thing, and this has been well broken down to enable us to then convert it into ethanol.'
It's the distillation process of the biomass which produces the ethanol.
PHILIP HALL: 'Bio-ethanol is a very very clean fuel, it's not contaminated with sulphur, such as the oil that we use; it's very clean and the government are keen to increase the percentage usage every year. I think we're using 5% at the moment in our motor vehicles, this goes to 10% this year so in all of our motor vehicles 10%... that's a lot of ethanol.
'Typically, a twin chamber plant of ours would deal with probably 200,000 tonnes, just short of 200,000 tonnes of municipal waste every year. From that, two-thirds of it would be biomass and that two-thirds of biomass we'd convert into approximately 36 million litres of ethanol.
TOM CHOWN, Kent TV: 'Recycling has almost become the middle class thing to do, you can do it as much as you like but there is always going to be domestic waste, isn't there?'
PHILIP HALL: 'Absolutely and it's ever increasing. No matter how many times we say we won't have plastic bags there is another form, it's a paper bag, wherever there is always going to be waste and you've only to look around our countryside and our towns and cities to see there is [sic] copious amounts of it.'
With the earth's depleting natural resources the demand for bio-ethanol is anticipated to increase, but there may be other uses than to fuel our cars.
PHILIP HALL: 'Not everybody wants ethanol, not every country wants ethanol I should say. There are some countries, maybe South Africa for instance -- who continually has power cuts every day -- that want consistent electricity, we can do that, quite simply we take the ethanol, we have a specially designed jet engine, only one moving part, very very clean state of the art engine, we introduce the ethanol into it and we create probably about 13megs of electricity. That in real terms, I suppose, is probably in excess of 19,000 homes, domestically, that could be provided with electricity; that's a significant amount.'
In the 20th century this technology may have seemed pie in the sky, but for £36 million pounds Philip is confident he can deliver an entire plant with an estimated lifespan of 20 years. That's an awful lot of bio-ethanol to be made from your rubbish.
An inventor from Westerham near Sevenoaks claims to have developed a method of converting our domestic waste into a limitless energy resource. This prototype is the first stage of the process. The shredded waste is broken down as it travels the length of the rotating cylinder by injecting it with steam at 160˚C.
PHILIP HALL, Managing Director, Reclaim Resources: 'After the waste has gone through the vantage waste processor we're left then with a more fibrous product; it certainly has pieces of plastic and bits of metal but it's been shredded and sanitized, reduced in volume. This will then go through to an automatic sorting whereby all the plastic will be taken out and any metals that may be there. We're really interested in what's left, which is the biomass, which is the flour, the food stuff, the cardboard, that sort of thing, and this has been well broken down to enable us to then convert it into ethanol.'
It's the distillation process of the biomass which produces the ethanol.
PHILIP HALL: 'Bio-ethanol is a very very clean fuel, it's not contaminated with sulphur, such as the oil that we use; it's very clean and the government are keen to increase the percentage usage every year. I think we're using 5% at the moment in our motor vehicles, this goes to 10% this year so in all of our motor vehicles 10%... that's a lot of ethanol.
'Typically, a twin chamber plant of ours would deal with probably 200,000 tonnes, just short of 200,000 tonnes of municipal waste every year. From that, two-thirds of it would be biomass and that two-thirds of biomass we'd convert into approximately 36 million litres of ethanol.
TOM CHOWN, Kent TV: 'Recycling has almost become the middle class thing to do, you can do it as much as you like but there is always going to be domestic waste, isn't there?'
PHILIP HALL: 'Absolutely and it's ever increasing. No matter how many times we say we won't have plastic bags there is another form, it's a paper bag, wherever there is always going to be waste and you've only to look around our countryside and our towns and cities to see there is [sic] copious amounts of it.'
With the earth's depleting natural resources the demand for bio-ethanol is anticipated to increase, but there may be other uses than to fuel our cars.
PHILIP HALL: 'Not everybody wants ethanol, not every country wants ethanol I should say. There are some countries, maybe South Africa for instance -- who continually has power cuts every day -- that want consistent electricity, we can do that, quite simply we take the ethanol, we have a specially designed jet engine, only one moving part, very very clean state of the art engine, we introduce the ethanol into it and we create probably about 13megs of electricity. That in real terms, I suppose, is probably in excess of 19,000 homes, domestically, that could be provided with electricity; that's a significant amount.'
In the 20th century this technology may have seemed pie in the sky, but for £36 million pounds Philip is confident he can deliver an entire plant with an estimated lifespan of 20 years. That's an awful lot of bio-ethanol to be made from your rubbish.
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