Chicken Feathers
Yes, this is actually about chicken feathers. Partly, at least.
During my reading this morning, I read a science brief (rather like this one: "Poultry Feathers Made Into Plastic Mulch" by Sharon Durham at Agricultural Research Service news) about some Agricultural Research Service research and engineering going on that has developed some processes that convert chicken feathers into plastic.
Pretty obviously, this is the type of topic that's going to grab my attention, because it sounds silly but isn't.
First off, the idea is good and it's practical. It was reported that the process works with chicken feathers that have already been cleaned and chopped, and uses conventional equipment for the processing, which would make it practical. Chicken feathers, it seems, are mostly made of the protein keratin, which is tough, lightweight, and "relatively processable".
The payoff could be huge, largely because there's an abundance of raw material. As Ms. Durham writes:
Approximately four billion pounds of feathers are generated each year during the poultry production process, resulting in a serious solid agricultural waste problem.
That is an amazing amount of chicken feathers! First, think about the size of the average feather pillow, which has a little under a pound of feathers in it. Now, imagine four billion feather pillows if you can. (US annual chicken production is about 45 billion pounds of chickens; each chicken weighs about 5.25 pounds, so that's about 8 billion chickens. We in the state of Maryland have to be up on our chicken facts since Maryland was the home of the late Frank Purdue.)
There's a local interest for me in this story, too. It turns out that the scientist/engineer (self-described as a "Research Chemist") spearheading the chicken-feather research is Dr. Justin R. Barone, who works for the Deptment of Agriculture at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC), in Beltsville, Maryland. (Beltsville, by the way, was named for Trueman Belt in 1835, when he gave the B & O Railroad right of way through his property. Beltsville is at the northern-most exit of the Capitol Beltway around Washington, DC, and many people seem to think that Beltsville is named for the Beltway, but it's not. The only significance between "beltway" and "beltsville" is that it's the location of our nearest Ikea store.)
The BARC is a surprisingly venerable research location. Early last century the USDA needed more space and began, in 1910, to buy land in Beltsville for the Agricultural Research Service, its research arm. Dairy and animal husbandry moved in first. They were joined by animal disease research in 1936, then plant research in 1939. Eventually the BARC covered over 14,000 acres, making it the largest center of agricultural research in the world. Among other things, we owe its researchers for creating some of our most productive modern varieties of agricultural crops, like corn. The BARC is also home to the National Agricultural Library, the tallest building for some distance.
For nearly a decade, Isaac and I lived in a house just about a mile down the road (Rhode Island Avenue, for the locals) from the Agricultural Library. Consequently, we frequently drove by and through the BARC, which is very scenic. In the summer there are fields gowing experimental corn and soy beans, cows stand around in some of the fields, and the main road winds through fields featuring bucolic barns and out buildings. I find it especially enchanting to drive through the BARC by moonlight.
There are a number of curious road names that one sees driving through the BARC that suggest its research activities: Animal Husbandy Road, Entomology Road, Biocontrol Road, Beaver Dam Road, and Soil Conservation Road are just some.
Now, Soil Conservation Road (which has a green, rectangular sign for its name that's quite a bit longer than usual) is an important road in the area. It links other thoroughfares, and it goes past the east side of the Goddard Space Flight Center. Goddard is intimately associated with the BARC, since it was the BARC that transferred 548 of its acres to NASA in 1961 so that NASA could build the Goddard Space Flight Center.
The most prominant building that you see as you pass Goddard is a large, blue and white building that houses the "High Bay Clean Room", a specially built room, 60 feet high (enclosing 1.3 million cubic feet), with air filtered to extremely low levels of particulate contamination. The building was built for putting together ("integrating" in NASA speak) the Hubble Space Telescope. According to Prince George's County "Fun Facts":
The world's largest clean room is in Prince George's County at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The Hubble Clean Room is an 86,000 square-foot (7989.4 square-meter) building used to integrate and test space equipment and hardware. How clean is it? 1,000 times cleaner than a hospital operating room.
This clean room (for the specialists: it's apparently Class 10,000) would be one whence you've seen pictures of engineers and scientists walking around in "bunny suits", those flimsy white outfits that cover just about everything except for the face. (Some of us get special little hair-nets for the chin if we have beards.) The bunny suits get very hot, but they do look very space age. I know from experience working in a clean room on a space instrument. Although I have worked in the building housing the Hubble Clean Room, I've never worked in that clean room. My time was spent in the clean room at the facilities of Ball Aerospace, in Boulder, Colorado.
So anyway, I was rather interested to read about this process that turns chicken feathers into plastic.
I should probably note that this is not the only approach to solving the problem of too many chicken feathers. It appears that another researcher, in Israel, has been trying to breed a featherless chicken. You can read about that in this story: "Featherless chicken creates a flap" (May 2002), which comes complete with a rather disturbing photograph of the "prototype featherless chicken".
[Edited and updated from the original verion of 7 April 2005.]
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., The Art of Conversation
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on Monday, 2 May 2005 at 13.55
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