Today on the occasion of Christmas festival , when people are sharing their blessings and best wishes with their loved one by giving Christmas cards, the scientist are going through their research of making enough bio-fuel by large amount of discarded wrapping paper and Christmas cards.
However, according to a report, there are around 1.5 billion cards and 83 square kilometers of wrapping paper has been thrown away by UK residents over the Christmas period. They currently go to landfill or are recycled in local schemes.
And, at Imperial College London, the scientist has found a new study that if all of UK’s discarded wrapping paper and Christmas cards were collected and fermented, they could make enough bio-fuel to run a double-decker bus to the moon and back more than 20 times.
According to the researchers estimation, this amount of discarded waste paper could help to produce provide 5-12 million liters of biofuel that could easily turn into transportation fuel like diesel and petrol and helping in reduction of the impact of fossil fuels on the environment.
In the study that will be published in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Energy and Environmental Science,Dr Richard Murphy from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London quoted, “If one card is assumed to weigh 20g and one square metre of wrapping paper is 10g, then around 38,300 tonnes of extra paper waste will be generated at Christmas time”.
“People should not stop recycling their discarded paper and Christmas cards because at the moment there is no better solution. However, if this technology can be developed further, waste paper might ultimately provide a great, environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels. There’s more work to do to assess the effectiveness and benefits of the technology, but we think it has significant potential,” Dr Murphy added.
