Researcher Unleashes Energy From Food Waste, Plastics, Cardboard and More
Our society piles up literal mountains of garbage in landfills. University of Maryland environmental science and technology Professor Stephanie Lansing and her students are mining those foul-smelling hills to develop and refine techniques for creating energy from food waste and other detritus.
Our turkey carcasses and uneaten sweet potatoes, for instance, can be converted through anaerobic digestion—a process in which bacteria break down organic matter—into biofuel, while many other kinds of waste can become fuel to create renewable electricity through thermochemical processing.
“We’re taking something that is a wasted resource and turning it into something that we need, which are electricity, heat and fuel,” said Lansing, who led the Bioenergy and Biotechnology Lab, working at the nexus of renewable energy, water quality, waste treatment and human health.
Lansing is a member of the the Global FEWture Alliance—a UMD-based international research team that is scaling technology-based solutions, community-driven capacity building, and experiential education focused at the food-energy-water-climate-health nexus. The team's work was funded by a Grand Challenges Institutional grant from the university.
Join Lansing as she combs through a local landfill for raw material, and later in the lab where her climate-friendly fuel technologies originate in the latest installment of “Enterprise: University of Maryland Research Stories.”
This story was originally published by Maryland Today.
