Use leftovers or we could soon be running on empty

Mar 17 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

CAN Birkenhead YMCA save the planet with rotten cabbages? Too much pressure, you’d probably cry, but it has an opportunity to take some steps towards a better world for all of us.

Apparently, the YMCA is just the kind of active local charitable organisation that would be ideal to convert its short-range transport to run on rotting sprout stalks, potato peelings and grass clippings.

The man who says so, Chris Maltin, is a mechanical engineer who helped persuade the Government to introduce lead-free petrol. Initially, when successfully demonstrated with a converted Ford Cortina, in 1971, it was dismissed by officials as impossible because petrol stations simply wouldn’t install suitable pumps. However, after seeing medical evidence that children brought up within close range of spaghetti junction in Birmingham were going mad due to breathing huge levels of lead from vehicle exhausts, the government miraculously took a policy U-turn. Even now, annual deaths from vehicle pollution-related illnesses is three times greater than those caused by road accidents.

“All vehicles could be run on the vegetable waste that comes out of Wirral each day. Instead, it’s carted off in trucks to be buried near Wrexham,” says Chris, founder and chief executive of Organic Power Ltd, speaking at Birkenhead YMCA’s Humanity in the Community event.

“Less than half the food in the world is actually eaten. All those discarded stalks, peelings, cauliflower leaves and left-overs from people’s plates can be very simply treated to use as biomethane to power all the community vehicles. It just needs people who are dedicated to put this together and the YMCA is the sort of organisation to achieve this.

“Food processing waste from factories costs £60 a ton to bury as landfill. As it gets more difficult to find space the cost is rising. Also new EU directives rule that the amount of waste put in landfill must be drastically reduced. Recycled vegetable waste is the purest fuel and is good for climate change.”

This fits in with Organic Power Ltd’s intentions to contribute more than any other company in the world to the reduction in environmental pollution and mitigation of climate change from greenhouse gases.

Surprisingly, one third of the world’s energy requirement is for transport.

Chris claims he is not cynical but simply realistic about the ways our rulers work: “British government policy is not determined by reason. It responds to well-funded pressure groups with vested interests. Oil companies act the way they do as they are businesses which have to make money and are responsible to their shareholders. We need dedicated organisations like the YMCA which will lead the way and see through these ideas for the greater good.

“If we go back 90m years, there was almost no oxygen and the majority of the earth’s atmosphere was carbon dioxide. The carbon was taken out of the atmosphere by plants where it remained locked up until, as coal and oil, we started burning them and releasing carbon back into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. The methane given off from food waste is around 21 times worse than carbon dioxide, yet converting it into a biomethane transport fuel is our best tool against climate change.”

He says that other alternative fuels such as biodiesel, bioethanol, wind power, solar energy, wind and wave power, electricity or hydrogen all merely reduce climate damage by being “less bad” than fossil fuels, rather than improving the environment.

“Natural gas from the North Sea, which is now running out, took billions of years to make, but we can make equivalent gas in 18 days from rotting vegetables,” he says.

This technology is being embraced by Germany and Sweden. Pakistan aims to have 50% of vehicles running on biomethane. So why are we so slow? He says: “We suffer from being earlier adopters, that is have infrastructure for older technologies and that is always difficult to change.”

Then he cheerfully adds: “Only ignorance and apathy in politics are stopping us from going ahead. I am optimistic. I’m a grandfather, so I care deeply about the future.”

peter.elson@dailypost.co.uk