Chicken Feathers to Become Biodiesel

Vegetarians and vegans and PETA activists and other sensitive animal-loving souls beware: this post is about plucked, post-industrial chicken feathers. And it’s a bit gross. But it becomes cheap, domestic, high-energy-density biodiesel in the end, so, um, yay!

Researchers at the University of Nevada have found that the feathers of chickens contain fat, and as anyone who’s followed a Volvo converted to run on french-fry grease knows, fat can be turned into fuel. One ton of feathers makes about 18 gallons of biodiesel, which should cost about a buck a gallon to put into your VW TDI.

The system would use the byproducts of the chicken meat industry, so no chickens would be grown specifically for fuel. The processing plant would pluck and process the chickens for meat, just like they do now, and the feathery waste (plus some of the blood and guts) would be turned into biofuel, plus some animal feed, soap base, and fertilizer. There’s a lot of usable stuff in those feathers, it seems.

Chem majors and sticklers can read the whole article in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry.

Photo by Fred Dawson.