Have you been bombarded
with catalogues this Holiday Season as the online and mail shopping has hit
record highs? It’s clearly good news for the Post Office if they capture some
of the product delivery business as well as delivering the catalogues.
Recycling is another
problem and it’s not as easy with glossy paper as the clays and inks are
difficult to remove. The contents of your crosscut shredder are even more
problematical as many facilities can’t handle the confetti-like pieces so they
end up in landfill.
A new solution may be rushing
towards us from Sony according to a BBC report (1). They have devised a
bio-digester power plant, which was on show last week in a miniaturized form.
The system is based on enzymes from the class cellulase, which chop up the
cellulose chains making up the paper into the individual glucose building
blocks.
Lots of species live on
cellulose and have to produce the enzymes to break it down. Fungi, termites and
cows are all examples of cellulose users. Once the glucose is produced, they use
it for energy, and Sony have put together a system for enzymic oxidation of the
glucose to produce electrical energy.
The reported byproducts
aren’t too unpleasant. The main one is gluconolactone (for the foodies amongst us, that is E575), which hydrolyses to gluconic acid when in water (good
for pickling).
I can envisage a brave new
world where we power our computers from old catalogues and shredded
correspondence from the political arena, and then strain the liquid byproduct
into jars to pickle our cabbage and cucumbers prior to tossing the solid waste
onto the compost pile to grow more cabbages. We may need to add a solar cell or
two to fill in for the one or two weeks a year when our mail boxes aren’t
filled.
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