Microbes — saving lawns and creating dung power
CNET’s News.com has a couple of great stories as part of a special ”agritech” report, or what I would classify as cleantech. The first takes a look at converting barnyard waste — ahem, cow dung — into high-grade fertilizer and methane gas that’s used to create electricity. Not new, but reporter Michael Kanellos explores the growing investment in this space and looks at some companies making a good go at it against the backdrop of skyrocketing fossil-fuel prices.
The second is a story about how biopesticide companies are experiencing tremendous growth as a replacement for chemical pesticides, which are banned in many communities or restricted by regulation. The market is growing by an estimated 22 per cent a year in the United States and could be a billion-dollar industry by 2010. Kanellos takes a look at a few U.S. companies doing work in this important area, though he doesn’t mention botanical approaches (i.e. EcoSmart) and other alternatives.
For a primer on the biopesticide market in Canada, check out this Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada executive summary, which is a couple of years old unfortunately. If anybody knows of any Canadian companies focusing on this area please pass along the names.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca