last updated 1st December 05
By 4ecotips

Milk-power brings cows in from the cold

Whilst cattle deliver an enormous amount of methane into our skies, a Cumbrian newspaper the News and Star reports that a local husband-and-wife team are patenting a process to stabilise whey. So this rather puts the beasts' presence on the planet into perspective.

The couple have been recycling the whey and by stabilising it can find it has applications in shampoos, paints, modelling clay and could be used as biofuel.

Biofuel has recently received a boost with the biofuels obligation, under which all road fuels must contain 5% renewable content by 2010. So the innovation could also have far reaching consequences for the dairy industry. In fact it would offer farmers a way of using whey, which is currently regarded as a biohazard and cannot just be tipped away.

Meanwhile in New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra is already trialing the use of - to produce ethanol alcohol as a "biofuel" for cars. One of the company's transport depot managers, has been running his 1.8 litre car for the past month on a mixture of petrol containing 10% ethanol from whey.

Fonterra says that ethanol, as a fuel, has significant environmental benefits over the fossil fuel it replaces: it is renewable, biodegradable, and, by reducing the amount of fossil fuel in use, could help the campaign to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The NZ government is offering greenhouse gas-reduction projects millions of carbon credits - each equivalent to one tonne of carbon dioxide - that will be able to be sold internationally for between $10 and $20 a tonne.

Also in New Zealand, Agrigenesis, the plant division of Auckland-based Genesis Research and Development, has proposed genetically engineering a quick-growing willow that it says would be ideal for fermenting into ethanol to blend with petrol.