By Tom Davey, Editor
An unlikely blend of treadmills, chicken fat, clothes lines and calories has been brought together in a new form of eco-convergence. Down south, a University of Georgia campus maintained a viable heating system - including all its hot water - by burning 300,000 (US) gallons of chicken fat and yellow restaurant grease. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, only a retrofit of a steam boiler was required. Thomas Adams, of the university's department of biological and agricultural engineering, says that: "In the United States, something like 11 billion pounds of waste chicken fat are produced a year. It's renewable, it's homegrown, and fairly evenly distributed throughout America. Moreover, it burns very cleanly, with very low sulphur and absolutely no odour whatsoever."
Convergence shifts from chicken fat to a report by Steven Vogel, a biology professor at Duke University, specializing in biophysics. Vogel, coincidently, is the German noun for bird. Dr. Vogel calculates that: "A worker doing hard physical labour all day - or a felon turning a treadmill - can put out some 100 watts of power. That's the output, in the form of a little light and a lot of heat from the familiar light bulb." He writes that: "We're at best only about 25 percent efficient, so an output of 100 watts requires a minimum input of 400 watts, which translates into about 350 calories per hour. Burning a tenth of a pound of good fuel - fat - yields 350 calories, so working at 100 watts for eight hours costs less than a pound of body fat - still nearly double a human male's normal energy use."
I don't know of any treadmills used in correctional institutions today, but the British used treadmills as punishment when Australia was a penal colony. Sometimes these treadmills performed useful agricultural tasks; sometimes they were used as cruel punishments with no utilitarian value. Treadmills are still used to draw water or drain rice fields in parts of Asia.
But as machines gradually released us from hard manual labour, many pay hundreds of dollars a year to work out on treadmills and stairmasters in health clubs to burn up fat! Health clubs even advertise "fat burner specials". Ironically, most of these machines require electrical energy to assist in measuring the calories we burn. Looking at it objectively, it seems an absurd cycle of events.
Our perverse waste of energy brings me to clothes lines. Buried in bylaw restrictions and covenants that house purchasers or condominium dwellers often miss, are clauses forbidding the use of clothes lines - an ironic twist to not in my backyard syndrome. In these ecologically sensitive times, this particular thou-shalt-not changed my feeling of bemused cynicism to "wait a minute, this isn't right!" But some people do get really uptight at the sight of clothes flapping in the breeze. There was at least one fist fight and subsequent court case because of a neighbour becoming irate over a clothes line in England. Was it the sight of female under garments flapping in the breeze that raised testosterone levels leading to the fight?
In North America, perhaps spurred on by appliance manufacturers, it became a fashion decree that clothes lines were gauche. The baby boomers decided that - unlike sun dried tomatoes - sun dried laundry was decidedly unfashionable. They had energy to burn and gleaming Maytags to burn it in.
During a ten-year stay in a fairly affluent subdivision north of Toronto, not a single clothes line was to be seen - except our small rotary one which remained a solo, as well as a solar event. Later, I learned there were bylaws which forbade all clothes lines except the rotary ones. In Australia, rotary clothes lines evolved into substantial structures; indeed, my children used to use them as carousels.
Regulations in many condominiums and apartment buildings also forbid hanging clothes to dry on balconies. However, on a recent trip to Italy, we saw clothes lines strung up across many apartment porticos in Florence, a city whose very name is a synonym for culture. And, of course, clothes lines are taboo on many condo grounds in North America. So, even in southern states blessed with abundant sunshine, electrically powered clothes dryers tumble and rumble inside condo units while impeccably green lawns remain unblemished by the stigma of perfectly clean clothes drying in the sun.
But the laws of physics are immutable. Fossil fuels become increasingly expensive. They pollute the air significantly and are oblivious to natural borders. Fossil fuels are also finite. Other sources of power such as wind, solar, and nuclear, are being re-examined with urgency and increased determination. A veritable litany of eco-commandments now urges us to recycle, reuse, compost, carpool, and transit publicly.
Are we collective idiots? Wind and solar power to dry washing is free and non-polluting. Moreover, this power comes from a real nuclear source - the sun. This free energy - sunshine - is eternally lost in pursuit of an architectural ethos, incredibly backed up by the force of the law.
To summarize, using chicken fat as fuel transforms a waste disposal problem into a great energy opportunity. Linking treadmills to electrical power generation literally puts a new spin on the enormous forces required for everyday needs. It highlights the huge amount of electrical energy used to perform even simple tasks; it also reveals how we so absurdly squander valuable energy resources in Pursuit of the Trivial - a new game whose rules mean we all lose.