Turning Landfill Gas into Clean Energy

摘要

Landfills are often used as examples of decadent societies awash in their own waste, but a team of researchers presenting at this year's meeting of the American Chemical Society thinks differently. Their new method uses ordinary landfill waste to produce energy. A renewable energy source not often discussed, hydrogen fuel cells are attractive due to their scalability. However, the most common hurdle has been the strategy for reliably creating hydrogen to fill the cells at a low price point. Enter landfills, which contain microbes that naturally produce both methane and carbon dioxide gases: the building blocks for hydrogen creation.