Take the POOP Nutrient Challenge and get paid $30K for your crappy ideas! The EPA, along with Ben & Jerry's, the USDA, and a host of other heavyweights have launched a competition for craptastic concepts to deal with the dung overtaking our planet. Nothing like a dream team of most prolific poo-producers of all and the VERY organizations charged with monitoring these industries' waste-management infractions to really PILE IT ON! Learn how you can join the fecal fun and check out the steaming pile of resources in the video description on YouTube, including the totally-full-of-shi-tations blog post!
What cheapskates. The livestock industry has a huge waste problem on its hands, and it's only willing to pay $30,000 for the solution.
Fecal nutrients originate from the fodder crops that livestock animals eat, so a good solution would be to return these fecal nutrients back to the soil. This wouldn't be cheap though - imagine trucking millions of tons of dung from centralized feedlots, all the way back to the various farms that produced the fodder crops in the first place. It's cheaper for farmers to just buy new fertilizer, which is what they do.
Some livestock farms collect their animal dung, and then use a process called "anaerobic digestion" to partly convert the dung into a combustible mixture of gases called "biogas". Biogas can be used to fuel electricity generators: http://www.energy.ca.gov/biomass/anaerobic.html . However, the anaerobic digestion process still leaves behind by-product wastes.
All of this should serve to highlight just how wasteful the livestock industry is.
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