It's a long shot, but U.S. researchers have put the humble duckweed up as the the next possible saviour of the world from global warming.
Scientists from the North Carolina State University made the discovery when looking at the potential for using the noxious weed as a cleaner of animal waste.
They found that growing the tiny aquatic plant on hog wastewater not only helped to dispose of the hog waste but also produced five to six times more starch per acre than corn, according to university researcher Dr. Jay Cheng.
The possibility of duckweed replacing corn or sugar cane as the world's source of biofuel
would delight environmentalists who contend that the switching of many acres of farmland to grow biofuels has put upward pressure on the price of food in developing countries, leading to food riots and scarcity.
Dr. Cheng said the use of duckweed as waste cleaner and biofuel was a win-win situation.
"We can kill two birds -- biofuel production and wastewater treatment -- with one stone -- duckweed," he explained, adding that starch from duckweed can be readily converted into ethanol using the same methods currently used for corn biofuel.
Corn remains the country's most popular source of biofuel but its use has come under fire from critics -- not only for food security issues -- but also because of the enormous amounts of water needed to grow the crop.
The duckweed would sidestep this issue by utilising it for its growth, along with large scale lagoons of wastewater that are used by pig farms.
"Duckweed could be an environmentally friendly, economically viable feedstock for ethanol," said Dr. Cheng.
Fellow researcher Dr. Anne-Marie Stomp said the growth of duckweed for biofuel had great potential.
The research, which is funded by the North Carolina Biofuels Center, was presented on March 21 at the annual conference of the Institute of Biological Engineering in Santa Clara, California.
© 2009 The Tech Herald.com, WOTR Limited.
