Do you know, every liter of gasoline burned produces 2.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide? Solution? – Alternative bio-fuels. But, what has the increasing demand for alternative fuel sources led to?
After the battle between man and vehicles on who to consume those harvested crops – be it soy, maize or corn – getting worse, leading to a “food-cum-alternative fuel crisis”, it is perhaps a wiser decision to turn down producing eco-friendly fuels from food resources and resort to some other non-human food sources.
How would it be, if — in a bid to help reduce global warming-triggering fossil fuel-based carbon emissions – bio-fuel is produced from something that humans don’t compete to grab, but produce as waste?
Yes, Sweden has resorted to recycling seized alcohol, human waste and animal carcasses for producing alternative transport fuels to power thousands of cars, buses, taxis, garbage trucks, and even a train. One-quarter of city buses in Stockholm – the capital city — run on ethanol or biogas.
To add to healing the environment, the Swedish government – last year — converted more than 700,000 liters of ‘confiscated alcohol’ into biofuel, which otherwise are poured down the drain by the customs officials, as a standard procedure.
Ingrid Jarlebrink of Tullverket, the Swedish Customs agency based in Malmö, Sweden.said,
This alcohol, which used to go to waste, is now turned into something that’s positive for the environment.
The innovation with the country’s biofuel-sources does not stop here! Along with the seized alcohol, Sweden also produces biogas amazingly from animal remains created from slaughterhouses as well as human waste!
Heating and putting into anaerobic digesters break the organic materials to biogas. And the result — almost 250 million cubic feet, i.e. 7 million cubic meters of clean-burning biogas is produced each year in the country.
Today, all of Linköaping’s public buses run on the alternative fuel.
Perhaps, it is these initiatives and successful execution of plans to cut down on global warming, the Swedish government in 2006, could confidently pledged to become the world’s first country to be oil-free by 2020!
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