Yucky Energizers: Garbage = Fuel?! Shifa Hayat Britannia (Elementary) Floor Location: J77V

Two over-whelming environmental calamities, constantly banging at the door of our consciousness, may very well be more closely related then you might originally think.

Calamity #1: We appear to be quickly running out of oil, the primary source of energy that fuels the planets existence!

Calamity #2: We are quickly becoming increasingly submerged by growing ocean of trash and garbage! However, the good news is that we have now discovered some amazingly effective, beneficial, and unique processes that could single-handedly solve both problems with the creation of biofuels and synthetics fuels derived directly from our trash and garbage!

To start with, my research question is the following, which type of “garbage” will produce the most carbon dioxide and therefore ethanol, from yeast feeding on glucose? And my hypothesis being that when I mix the yeast in with the blended apples, the balloon on top would expand the most, producing the largest amount of carbon dioxide.

To conduct the experiment, I did three trials, for different types of “garbage”, to see which one would produce the most carbon dioxide and ethanol. This was done by mixing in yeast with the garbage in a bottle, and putting a balloon overtops to capture the carbon dioxide released. Later on, the balloons were measured finding the volume of carbon dioxide and ethanol produced for each type of “garbage”.

At the end, my results showed that the yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisae – bakers yeast) did as good a job of converting sugars into carbon dioxide in the blended apples as it did in the sugar, which was purposefully used as a positive control. The tissues and tealeaves did comparably, whereas water was used as a negative control and produced no carbon dioxide. The chemical equation of fermentation was also used to get the approximate amount of ethanol produced.

On the whole, my hypothesis proved to be correct. Compared to the other types of “garbage” I conducted the experiment on, the blended apples did produce the largest volume of carbon dioxide and ethanol.

Read further on, to see how multiple tons of disgusting trash and garbage, can be converted for us to get clean and
efficient energy!