Try to catch “The Green” on the Sundance Channel. It’s a good showplace for all that’s happening in the environmental world. The other night I caught a segment showcasing Richard Wool, Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware. Delaware, as the professor states, is number one in soybeans and chickens so why not find a way to use all those feathers and soybean oil? So he and his students ground up a bunch of chicken feathers, compressed them with soybean oil to create a board, a circuit board.

Normally circuit boards are made from petroleum by products and copper. According to Dave Jones, an associate director in the Waste Management Division of the U.S. EPA on Pub Med Central website: “[T]here are both manufacturing and end-of-life issues to be considered: ‘You have the issue of the consumption of copper and petroleum products to begin with, and anytime you’re dealing with the extraction and use of virgin resources, you have the potential for incredible environmental impact,’ he says. ‘Then you have to consider what’s added to the petrochemical product to make the board—typically something like chlorine.’”

So anything Wool comes up with that will utilize the some 3 billion tons of waste feathers produced every year across the country, not just Delaware, is a good thing. Since chicken feathers are light, airy, they have a low dialectic constant, which means feathers are stable for a wide range of frequencies. My electricity teacher at Community College would be proud of me now since I still remember some stuff, especially all the algebra involved, but I digress. To put it simply, electric current likes airy conductor material like the hollow feathers. It can travel faster.

Wool created a prototype board out of the feathers and soybean oil that worked on the first try. He is now collaborating with none other than Tyson, which I reported not long ago was involved in collaboration with Conoco Phillips Oil to manufacture bio fuels from chicken grease. If Tyson keeps up the pace, it won’t be long before they utilize all parts of the bird so nothing is wasted.

Environmentally, it looks like we’re progressing from “Chicken Littles” to chicken lots. As Wool put it, there is literally no material out there that should be taken off the table as having potential to replace petroleum and it’s by products. 

Check out the Sundance video by Prof. Wool: sundance-channel-video-big-ideas-for-a-small-planet-gadgets-clip-11

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1247399

http://www.sundancechannel.com/videos/230321401