Should I run my car on ethanol?

In 1998, when I attended to a conference in Wisconsin, USA, there was a big dispute between those who love ethanol and those who hate ethanol. Each of them had their own reason to defend or attack fuel ethanol. At that time, oil industry was on one side, and farmers on the other side. This debate is still going on, in which one is for ethanol such as this one (sorry in Swedish) or against ethanol, such as this one.

Today, we see ethanol production in the world has passed more than 70,000,000,000, which is about 5 times more than its lever in 1998. It is a big business for many people in the world. However, we are still running on the first generation of ethanol, and we have no commercial second generation yet. The fact is that we have no single substitute for oil, and I believe we will have several different alternatives in the fuel market in the future. Now, there are many people believe in e.g. electrical vehicles. It is a good alternative for the cities and reducing CO2 emissions. However, are we allowed to destroy the amazon forests in order to access the lithium in that area for the batteries in electrical cars? It seems this debate will continue as long as we need energy (i.e. for ever).....

Resource Recovery

I read recently in the news that production of bioplastics will increase from 700,000 tons in 2010 to 900,000 tons this year and 1,700,000 tons in 2015. Europe in the biggest market of the bioplastics, where also the research and development is dominant. We at resource recovery at University of Borås are also working on this direction. Our vision on increasing the value of wastes in form of different products is presented in the following picture, while we have now intensive research on some fo these directions!

Waste Recovery in Vietnam?

I together with my colleague from the city council in Borås, Olle Engström had an intensive days this week in Vietnam. Together with the Swedish ambassador and his collegues in embassy, and the representative from ICLD, Swedish CENTEC in Vietnam and Sustainable Business Hub, we started our trip from Hanoi and visited Da Nang, Hoi An, Quy Nhon, Ho Chi Minh City and Vung Tau from north to south of the country in 6 days. These cities have 120,000 to 9 million inhabitants, and all of them were interested to initiate collaboration with us in "Waste Recovery" in order to solve their huge problems with the wastes. We had good discussions with the local goverments, municipalites, universities and companies. The Swedish embassy did their best and the workshops were very well planned although very intensive, and resulted into some concrete discussions. Let's hope we can have enough capacity to handle all these new contacts and friends!


(The beautifull view of the beach in Quy Nhon from Seagull hotel)

1,300,000,000 tons/year food waste!

We see nowadays in the news that cucumbers are thrown away because of the this mysterious EHEC desease in Germany. It makes a bad feeling when we see such pictures. However, without being ashamed, we in Europe and North America throw away between 95 and 115 kg/year food each person. The corresponding number in Southeast Asia is 6-11 kg per person.

According to a recent report from FAO, developed country and developing countries throw away 670 and 630 million tons per year, respectively, which is a total of 1.3 billion tons each year.

The full FAO report about "Global food losses and food wastes" is available here!

Interested in MSc or PhD education?

Yesterday was the graduating ceremony of our BSc students at the School of Engineering. There is generally a good job market for the engineers now. However, som of them might be interested to continue their education toward MSc or even PhD afterward.
I got a tips from Matt O'Brien about his blog on "Top 50 Must-Read Blogs Before Attending Grad School". It is a good collection for those of the students who are going to apply further education toward MSc or PhD. You may find some interesting points:
http://www.onlinemasters.org/top-50-must-read-blogs-before-attending-grad-school

This is also another intersting collection posted by Brandi Poss:
http://bestonlineuniversities.com/2011/50-awesome-weblogs-every-college-freshman-should-read/

In addition, education in our area on resource recovery has its own website:
http://resourcerecovery.se/

I wish good luck for all of the applicant, who are going to continue their educations!

Recycle and perhaps Reduce and Reuse of waste?

The terms 3 R or "Reduce, Reuse and Recycle" is known globally, and a lot of efforts are done to improve waste management in the world. There have been some successes in different countries about the second and third "R", i.e. reuse and recycling of the wastes. However, I am not sure how many countries have succeeded to reduce their wastes, while the economy is growing!

In Sweden, we had continuous growth of the households waste production for at least 20 years. However, this trend is broken since 2008, and the municipal waste production is reducing. The organization Swedish Waste Management (Avfall Sverige) has recently published the data for the total municipal wastes 2010, and their treatment methods, which shows a clear decrease compared to 2009 and 2008.

Nuclear or solar energy in Japan?

The recent nuclear disaster in Japan forced many countries to rethink about their energy policy. Japan is of course expected to be heavily affected by the Fukushima. However, it is interesting to follow how the country reacts. While many countries in the last decades and energy crises invested on different sources of energy, we heard that Japan had planned to take half of its energy from nuclear energy in 2030. While considering nuclear as a non-renewable source of energy, it was an interesting policy!

Now, Japan has changed their policy and wants to have solar energy for 10 million households in 2020. Let's see if this goal is too ambitious or not!

Better Life Index and hapiness?

Having a better life is a general goal of everybody. But, what is better life?
There is a better life index which include several factors as housing, income, jobs, community, educations, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safelty and work-life balance. It compares 34 OECD countries here, but I think they forgot to add happiness which is a major factor. Sweden has a good position in this index!

A PhD thesis on textiles wastes to ethanol and biogas

Textile and cloths in the current human society is a matter of fashion and beauty as well as its function to cover our body. We heard recetly debates from e.g. the former speaker of Swedish Environmental party on buying less cloths in order to save environment, but at the same time, we heard from KappAhl that was proud to sell more and more cloths in Sweden. The global annual fiber consumption is now more than 70,000,000 tons, including about 40% cellulose (cotton and viscose). Soon or late it is ended in waste stations.

Our PhD candidate Azam Jeihanipour has worked now about 4 years on these wastes and developed processes for conversion of textile wastes to ethanol and biogas. She will defend her thesis in two weeks on 27 May 2011. I wish her success during the defense!

Her thesis can be found here, and her published articles the thesis:

1- Ethanol production from cottonbasedwaste textiles”, Bioresource Technology (2009), 100 (2), 1007-1010

2- Enhancement of ethanol and biogas production from high-crystalline cellulose by different modes of NMMO pretreatment”, Biotechnology and Bioengineering (2010), 105 (3), 469-476.

3- A novel process for ethanol or biogas production from cellulose inblended fibers in waste textiles”, Waste Management (2010), 30 (12), 2504-2509.

4- Enhancement of solubilization rate of cellulose in anaerobic digestion and its drawbacks”, ProcessBiochemistry, in press

Journal publications by MSc students!

There are always many talented and hard-working students. We have had several MSc students who worked well and pubished their work in scientific conferences or international scientific journals. I jused looked back in our journal publications and found many published papers, in which MSc students had great contributions. Many of those students are now Doctor or PhD students somewhere. Here is the list of these publications in which the name of those MSc students are underlined (there are also several manuscripts in publications process that are not in this list):

Journal articles (peer reviewed):

1. Modig, T., Lidén, G., and Taherzadeh, M.J. (2002): Inhibition effects of furfural on alcohol dehydrogenase, aldehyde dehydrogenase and pyruvate dehydrogenase. Biochemical J., 363(3): 769-776

2. Taherzadeh, M.J., Fox, M., Hjorth, H., Edebo, L., (2003). Cultivation of Rhizopus oryzae in synthetic medium and paper pulp sulfite liquor to produce mycelium biomass, ethanol and lactic acid. Bioresource Technol., 88(3): 167-177

3. Sues A., Millati R., Edebo L., Taherzadeh M.J. (2005): Ethanol Production from Hexoses, Pentoses, and Dilute-acid Hydrolyzates by Mucor indicus, FEMS Yeast Res., 5(6-7): 669-676

4. Arabi, R., Bemanian, S., Taherzadeh, M.J. (2007): Rapid Biodegradation of Methyl tert–Butyl Ether (MTBE) by Pure Bacterial cultures, Iran. J. Chem. Chem. Eng., 26(1): 1-7

5. Jeihanipour A., Karimi K., Taherzadeh M.J. (2007): Antimicrobial properties of fungal chitosan, Res J Biol Sci, 2(3): 239-243

6. Ebrahimi, F., Khanahmadi, M., Roodpeyma, Sh., Taherzadeh, M.J. (2008): Ethanol production from bread residues, Biomass Bioenergy, 32: 333-337

7. Sharifia, M., Karimi K., Taherzadeh M.J. (2008): Production of ethanol by filamentous and yeast-like forms of Mucor indicus from fructose, glucose, sucrose, and molasses, J. Ind. Microb. Biotechnol., 35(11): 1253-1259

8. Dehkhoda, A., Brandberg, T, Taherzadeh, M.J. (2009): Comparison of vacuum and high pressure evaporated wood hydrolyzate for ethanol production by repeated fed-batch using flocculating Saccharomyces cerevisiae, BioResources, 4(1): 309-320

9. Abedinifar, S., Karimi, K., Khanahmadi, M., Taherzadeh, M.J. (2009): Ethanol production by Mucor indicus and Rhizopus oryzae from rice straw by separate hydrolysis and fermentation, Biomass Bioenergy, 33(5): 828-833

10. Shafiei, M., Karimi, K., Taherzadeh, M.J. (2010): Pretreatment of spruce and oak by N-methylmorpholine-N-oxide (NMMO) for efficient conversion of their cellulose to ethanol, Bioresource Technol, 101(13): 4914-4918

11. Majdejabbari, S., Barghi, H., Taherzadeh. M.J. (2010): Synthesis and characterization of biosuperabsorbent based on ovalbumin protein, J. Macromol. Sci. Part A: Pure Appl. Chem., 47(7): 708-715

12. Mirahmadi, K, Kabir M.M., Jeihanipour, A., Karimi, K., Taherzadeh, M.J. (2010): Alkaline pretreatment of spruce and birch to improve bioethanol and biogas production, BioResources, 5(2): 928-938

13. Lohrasbi, M., Pourbafrani, M., Niklasson C., Taherzadeh M.J. (2010): Process design and economic analysis of a citrus waste biorefinery with biofuels and limonene as products, Bioresource Technol, 101(19): 7382-7388

14. López, Y., García, A., Karimi, K., Taherzadeh, M. J., and Martín, C. (2010): Chemical characterisation and dilute-acid hydrolysis of rice hulls from an artisan mill, BioResources 5(4), 2268-2277.

15. Bidgoli, H., Zamani, A.; Taherzadeh, M.J. (2010): Effect of carboxymethylation conditions on water binding capacity of chitosan-based superabsorbents, Carbohydrate Res., 345: 2683-2689

16. Hosseinpour, H., Karimi, K., Zilouei, H., Taherzadeh, M.J. (2010): Simultaneous pretreatment of lignocellulose and hydrolysis of starch in mixtures to sugars, BioResources, 5(4): 2457-2469

17. Shafiei, M., Karimi, K., Taherzadeh, M.J. (2010): Palm Date Fibers: Analysis and Enzymatic Hydrolysis, Int. J. Mol. Sci. 11(11), 4285-4296

18. Soudham, P.R.; Rodríguez D., Rocha G.J.M.; Taherzadeh M.J.; Martín C. (2011): Acetosolv delignification of marabou (Dichrostachys cinerea) wood with and without acid prehydrolysis, Forestry Studies in China, 13(1): 64-70

19. Akbari, H., Karimi, K., Lundin, M., Taherzadeh, M. J. (2011): Optimization of baker's yeast drying in industrial continuous fluidized-bed dryer, Food and Bioproducts Processing, in press

20. Millati, R., Wikandari, R., Trihandayani, E.T., Cahyanto, M.N., Taherzadeh M.J., and Niklasson, C. (2011): Ethanol from Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunch via Dilute-Acid Hydrolysis and Fermentation by Mucor indicus and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Agricultural J., 6(2): 54-59

21. Dehnavi, G.Z., Laucerica, J.L., Rodríguez, D., Beatón, M., Taherzadeh, M.J., Martin, C. (2011): Fractionation of the main components of barley spent grains from a microbrewery, Cellulose Chem. Technol, in press

22. Abtahi, Z., Millati, R., Niklasson, C., Taherzadeh, M.J. (2011): Ethanol production by Mucor indicus at high glucose and ethanol concentrations, Minerva Biotechnologica, in press

23. Jafari, V., Labafzadeh, S.R., Jeihanipour, A., Karimi, K., Taherzadeh, M.J. (2011): Construction and demolition lignocellulosic wastes to bioethanol, Renewable Energy, in press