Henry Daniell, a scientist from the University of Central Florida has developed a method of using household waste materials to produce ethanol.
Sources claim his approach could be greener and less expensive than current methods used to fuel vehicles which are powered by the substance.

The Engineer reports Daniell’s method has been used on products such as orange peel and newspaper, but can also be applied to products such as sugarcane, straw and switchgrass.

The method uses plant-derived enzymes to break down materials into sugar which can then be fermented into ethanol. Currently corn starch is used in the fermentation process and conversion into ethanol but this method is believed to produce more greenhouse gas emissions than petrol.

200 million gallons of ethanol could be produced from the discarded orange peels of Florida state alone, said Daniell.

The government has given the green light to a scheme which will see smart meters being installed into all of the UK’s 26 million homes. Although touted for some time, the approved plan will see British Gas and other energy suppliers given responsibility for installing the meters, which will allow consumers to monitor their own energy use, as well as allow the energy companies to read consumption levels remotely.

The ability to read meters remotely will forego the use of estimated bills, while the consumers’ ability to monitor their gas and electricity usage will help in their efforts to adopt a greener lifestyle.

But the estimated £8.5bn outlay threatened to usurp the announcement, with critics warning that energy companies may pocket the benefits rather than passing them back to the consumer by way of cheaper fuel. The Department of Energy and Climate change believes the expected savings to be in the region of £14.5bn – dwarfing the outlay costs – due to reduced administrative costs.

While the plans were welcomed by power companies and industry bodies, consumer groups and energy consultants voiced concerns that the smart meter rollout was being placed into the hands of a sector that had already come in for fierce criticism over high charges, and allegedly not passing on previous benefits to customers.

“We’re concerned that consumers could be saddled with the entire multibillion pound bill for a project that’s going to save the industry hundreds of millions of pounds a year,” said Martyn Hocking, editor of Which? magazine.

British Gas, however, believe that the government estimate of 2% saving on energy per household was conservative and the actual saving could be considerably higher after research in the United States suggested that customers’ energy use could be cut by as much as 20% by using smart metering technology.

The company also believes the roll-out of smart meters could create up to 2,600 additional jobs by 2012.

Watermelons could become the latest source of biofuel according to a report in the Telegraph online.

The report claims that scientists in the United States have discovered that around 50 percent of the fruit contained enough natural sugar for distilling into ethanol, which could provide valuable biofuel.

Retailers in the United States alone reject some 360,000 tonnes of ‘substandard’ fruit each year – fruit that is misshapen or blemished – which researchers suggest could produce nearly two million gallons of biofuel each year.

Currently, imperfect watermelons are ploughed back into the soil but a study into the potential of the fruit’s juice as a source of potential fuel by the US Department of Agriculture suggested the fruit could overtake chip fat, rapeseed oil and other sources of biofuel. Almost one fifth of the United States’ annual watermelon crop is left in the field due to imperfections and around twenty gallons of fuel could be produced per acre of fruit, according to the report published in the Biotechnology for Biofuels journal.

“We’ve shown that the juice of these melons is a source of readily fermentable sugars, representing a heretofore untapped feedstock for ethanol biofuel production,” said Dr Wayne Fish, the leader of the research team.