This Week's Weirdest Technology

If you've seen Disney's movie Chicken Run, you might appreciate the mental images conveyed by this week's weirdest technology:

A truck pulls up to one end of a plant. Straight from Butterball's nearby turkey slaughterhouse operations, waste products - totting heads, gnarled feet, slimy intestines, and lungs swollen with putrid gases - are dumped unceremoniously in. Two hours later, an oil carrier pulls up to the plant. They're not extracting something grisly, though. What the oil carrier sucks out is 150 barrels of fuel oil, valued at about $12,600 wholesale.

Literally some of the world's nastiest stuff turned into oil that's better than crude and doesn't requre a refinery to use.

In all, about 500 barrels of oil are made per day at the Changing World Technologies' plant. It comes from 270 tons of turkey waste and 20 tons of pig fat from another nearby slaughterhouse. What can't be converted into fuel isn't wasted, though - it becomes high-grade fertilizer, and water clean enough to discharge into a municipal wastewater system.

Our energy-hungry world could use more technology like this. It's called a biorefinery and it could virtually eliminate the waste we dump into landfills every year. The process this plant in Carthage, Missouri uses - thermal conversion - can take materials ranging from the turkey waste it uses to municipal sewage, old tires, mixed plastics, and all the other by-products of a throw-away society and turn it into something that people continue to fight for: high-quality oil.

Brian Appel, the plant's owner and CEO of Changing World Technologies, has had a rough time getting the plant off the ground. Funded privately and by government grants, it's taken more than 3 years just to get the settings right and to work with the nearby community on eliminating the extremely unpleasant smell of its operations.