ReCommunity Recycling, UMass Team up on Trash-to-Fuel Project
by Jim Kinney (Gazette) A company that runs recycling centers all over the country has researchers in UMass’ biofuels program thinking trash can to gas can.
ReCommunity Recycling has committed $635,000 to the Institute for Massachusetts Biofuels Research, also known as TIMBR, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in hopes of developing microbes that digest household trash and turn it into fuel. Add that to previous agreements ReCommunity has made for sponsored research with UMass and ReCommunity has made $1.26 million in commitments to the university over the past year.
But UMass isn’t just doing it for the money, said Susan B. Leschine, a professor of microbiology best known for identifying the Q Microbe.
“It’s such an area of societal need,” Leschine said. “The goal is to make as much use out of everything as we can.”
… UMass and TIMBR are good choices for this kind of work because the TIMBR team includes not just the microbiologists but the engineers who will hopefully help scale up the process to an industrial operation. Usually, the engineers are on one side of campus and the biologists are on the other, and they don’t interact very much. READ MORE
