Green Options

Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay up to date.

Now that we have picked apart the many hidden wonders of cow manure, we may safely examine yet another, more recent entry in the annals of excellent excrement: E. coli.

Believe it or not, E. coli may actually be useful for something other than infecting spinach or beef, giving you a serious case of diarrhea, and initiating massive recalls of different food products. The waste of these reputedly nasty little bacteria can, in fact, be used as a source for biofuel. No…er, joke.

As CNN reported recently, a biotech lab in San Francisco, LS9 Inc., is using a harmless form of E. coli to make biodiesel. The genetically altered bacteria get fed various forms of sugars, anything from sugar cane to wood chips or other plant waste, and after munching their little mitochondria out (they do not have hearts, after all), they poop the equivalent of diesel fuel.1 Now that is some exciting excrement!

I am still waiting to hear back from a spokeswoman at the USDA to find out the answer to the question I posed last week: who is in charge of protecting us from crops affected by flood water? In the meantime, I got an alert from the Centers for Disease Control about contaminated water in Iowa.  I can tell you, dear reader, that while you may not want to eat food grown along flooded riverbeds, you most definitely do not want to walk in that water, particularly if you have open sores or cuts on your feet and legs.  Exposing a sore on your skin to contaminated water puts you at risk for a nasty infection.