OutToLunch
New Member
so there I am performing the weekly ritual of mowing the lawn and i started wondering how much potential regular grass clippings have with respect to processing them into a bio-fuel.
I don't bag my grass clippings - I have close to an acre that needs mowing and the number of times I'd have to stop to empty the bag would just get annoying. So I just let the clippings rot and then go back into the soil. That got me thinking, though, of how many people in the USA mow their lawns each week (many do it twice a week or more). Just how much volume of grass clippings are produced each week in this country? How much fuel could be produced from these clippings, if any?
Sure, most of us use gasoline to mow the lawns and then if there was some type of infrastructure set up to collect all the clippings, fuel would be used to collect and transport them. Then, of course, is the efficiency of the conversion of the grass to fuel to think of. With all those losses, though, it seems to me that there is an enormous bio-crop that is being harvested on a weekly basis for most of the year and the only thing it is being used for is to fill up land fills, decompose back into the lawn or is being composted. With all that bio-material just sitting there, wouldn't there be some advantage attempting to collect it. I mean, we're cutting it anyway - why not collect it and process it if it has energy potential? Seems like it would be better than the government subsidized corn/methanol scam.
Perhaps all it would be good for would be to offset the fuel used to create it in the first place. That wouldn't be too bad, though. If all the fuel used to just mow the lawns was taken out of the fuel usage equation, wouldn't that result in a significant reduction in the amount of gas that this country consumes?
I don't bag my grass clippings - I have close to an acre that needs mowing and the number of times I'd have to stop to empty the bag would just get annoying. So I just let the clippings rot and then go back into the soil. That got me thinking, though, of how many people in the USA mow their lawns each week (many do it twice a week or more). Just how much volume of grass clippings are produced each week in this country? How much fuel could be produced from these clippings, if any?
Sure, most of us use gasoline to mow the lawns and then if there was some type of infrastructure set up to collect all the clippings, fuel would be used to collect and transport them. Then, of course, is the efficiency of the conversion of the grass to fuel to think of. With all those losses, though, it seems to me that there is an enormous bio-crop that is being harvested on a weekly basis for most of the year and the only thing it is being used for is to fill up land fills, decompose back into the lawn or is being composted. With all that bio-material just sitting there, wouldn't there be some advantage attempting to collect it. I mean, we're cutting it anyway - why not collect it and process it if it has energy potential? Seems like it would be better than the government subsidized corn/methanol scam.
Perhaps all it would be good for would be to offset the fuel used to create it in the first place. That wouldn't be too bad, though. If all the fuel used to just mow the lawns was taken out of the fuel usage equation, wouldn't that result in a significant reduction in the amount of gas that this country consumes?