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burnin grass

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OutToLunch

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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?
 
Throwing the grass clippings in the trash pile is already a loss. Anything you can gain from reducing garbage is a plus. Personally, I like the mulching mower, and let it feed the ground from which it came, so I don't need to fertilize much. While we're on yard waste, how about all the leaves collected in the fall? Most people leave sacks stuffed with them at the curb. I don't, again the mulching mower, pretty lazy when it comes to yard work. Pretty sure any plant material will ferment, so it would save some of the food crops from being used for fuel.

During the rainy season, my lawn seems to go from freshly mowed, to seed stalk in a week. Usually let it go another week...
 
Here you go:

**broken link removed**

Use the grass clippings to power the lawnmower.

John
 
For bio-mass to be useful, you need quite a system, not those peeny 2 cups illustrated by the students, rather something like the whole room per cup.
But I'm sure you can combine the grass with other feedstock to make methanol. I'm not sure whether your energy efficiency on grass would be positive or negative though.
The methanol can be put to good use, but with care.
 
Heating your house with grass clippings

Here is a link to plans for heating your house with grass clippings by composting. I haven't tried any of it, but there is lots of neat stuff on this site if you're not offended by all the religious references. Someone has spent a lot of time doing the math and the design.

mb-soft.com/public3/globalzl.html[/url]
 
personaly I don't have the problem as I have 2 cows, so they produce it already into fertilizer for my land but in case you don't have cows, i would say compost it or as harvey sugest put it back in the ground

Robert-Jan
 
Robert-Jan, you raise an important point.
We tend to take a lot out of the soil, but we have to remember to put something back, like your grass clippings, etc.
 
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