Trolley-truck / biochar hybrid to get councils off oil?

[Eclipse Now]

Hi all,

just thinking about local government transport the other day.

 

According to this Low-tech Magazine: Get wired (again): Trolleybuses and Trolleytrucks there is a paper that trolley-buses can be 5 times cheaper to install than trams! That's 25 km instead of 5 km of public transport.

 

But what I was considering is what happens to all the local council green waste? Here in Hornsby Shire, Sydney, significant quantities of lawn and tree clippings and garden waste are collected each fortnight, taken to a local waste plant and.... ? Not quite sure what happens then.

 

How are our council rubbish, road servicing trucks, and delivery services going to get around after peak oil?

 

OK, here's one idea.

 

Trolley bus lines that also service hybrid trolley trucks.

 

I mean, if we can move from this a few years ago...

 

 

...to this these days...

 

Low-tech Magazine: Get wired (again): Trolleybuses and Trolleytrucks

...then surely there's a place for council rubbish trucks in between.

 

AND if they are diesel as well as electric, then only the main roads have to be rigged up with the trolley-bus lines and the local buses & trucks can go "off the route" to service side streets.

 

But what are they running on?

 

All that local council green waste! According to Rob at Transition Culture:

 

“…The machine they have developed for doing the charcoal burning basically takes 10 tons of any woody or plant biomass and turns it into 1 ton of charcoal and 3.2 tons of diesel.”

Then councils are able to make their own fuel, dispose of their green waste, sell Biochar back to the local gardeners, and maybe even claim carbon credits as well! The trucks would run off either syngas or synfuel, depending on how much processing of the biochar gas they wanted to engage in.

 

Who wants their local council to make a bit more money?

I love this stuff!

 

As Eprida say:

We don't maximize for hydrogen; we don't maximize for biodisel; we don't maximize for char...By being a little bit inefficient in each, we approximate nature and get a completely efficient cycle.

[Michaelangelica]

Within 5k from my house, I swear, i could 'salvage' a tonne of wood waste a day.

Any ideas for a steam generator, connected to the grid? It needs to be smokless and preferably produce charcoal as a by-product.

 

The "green waste" mountain is ridulous. My council has a big, fortnighly, bin collection + six, big, waste-curbside pick ups, per household, per year.

Another Council--The Blue Mountains- gets residents to put their green 'waste' on the kerb; they come with a mulcher, and mulch it 'free of charge' for you, and you put it back on your garden. Sounds like someone is using their brain cell.

I am loathe to thow out anything organic i figure some wee beastie will find the bigger tree branches eventually.

i am starting a campaign against 'neatness' in gardening. Nature is not neat! (Not in the obsessive compulsive 'tidy' way anyhow :) )

[Eclipse Now]

Yeah, I dunno about economical ways to install a turbine at the home level. Some people make biochar by sticking it in a steel bin and burning it at home, but they use so much wood to burn a steel drum of biochar that it's got to be Co2 positive, not Co2 negative. But if the wood is going to rot all that Co2 back out into the atmosphere anyway, then I say go for it and at least sequester the biochar Co2 anyway!

 

YouTube - Official Biochar Tutorial Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEGmP6dhW5c

 

However, to REALLY sequester all those local lawn clippings AND provide some energy for the local residents, one can't go past the idea of the local council getting together and building a local biochar plant.

 

Blue Mountains are beautiful. We go to a big church conference there every Easter, and always enjoy strolling up and down Leura, the way we USED to build communities!

 

(I'm almost saddened by the fact that peak oil will probably be partly solved by mass adopting of the "Better Place" electric car battery swap system that's being introduced in Canberra in 2012 before rolling out across Australia. I was hoping to see far more "Leura's" popping up throughout suburbia over the next 20 years. Now it seems we'll be stuck with driving, and Westfields, and all that guff for generations to come...)