Trash Talk

Funny that no one has pursued this before (yes, funny that...):

A graduate student at Babson College's School of Business, Eten has developed a business plan around large-scale composting of organic solid waste. His company, Feed Resource Recovery, is one of 10 to be chosen this year for MIT's Ignite Clean Energy competition for aspiring entrepreneurs.

The technology behind Feed Resource Recovery is anaerobic digestion, the breakdown of organic material by bacteria, creating methane in the process. Industrial-scale digesters, which treat the waste, are already in commercial use, including on farms where cow manure generates "biogas."

Eten envisions using the same equipment in urban settings: His plans call for collecting organic waste from supermarkets and processing it at a nearby site. The trash can be any compostable material, including food waste and paper products.

It's funny how this discussion is always presented in an "environmental" context, but it seems that environmentalism is really irrelevant. It seems to me to be just basic logic: we as a nation (and, by extension, as a planet) have ever-growing energy needs. After all, we're all buying new cars, an infinite array of consumer electronics, and of course those electric pepper mills, so it seems sensible to me to pursue ways of producing said energy using resources which are vastly renewable (like garbage). (I have always said that inventing a car that ran on urine would simultaneously solve the two biggest problems of long car trips.) I mean, do we really want to rely on an energy source that is a) staggeringly finite (depending on whose peak oil production numbers you care to believe) and, b) is located predominantly in the most politically unpleasant part of the world? Coming up with an alternative seems like a no-brainer. Again, it's funny how no one has pursued that vigorously. (The sarcasm is intended.)

Technologically impossible, you say? Heck, if they can make a goddamn umbrella that can forecast the weather (see below)--or any of the other useless technocrap that turns up on Gizmodo and other gadget blogs--surely someone can come up with something?

Uprooting and decimating entire industries because of a shift in technology? Heck, I spend my days writing about the fracking printing industry, which is bring dramatically transformed (read: killed) because of new technology. Why should anyone else be exempt?