<nettime> [fwd] Beef, Cement, etc. etc.

[t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

     ['collaborative text filtering' -- cheers, t]

www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200401/msg00018.html

     * Subject: [IP] Beef, Cement, etc. etc.
     * From: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>
     * To: ip@v2.listbox.com
     * Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2004 16:16:10 -0500
     _________________________________________________________________

Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2004 21:33:02 +0100
From: Filippo Cattaneo <filippo.cattaneo@tiscali.it>
Subject: Beef, Cement, etc. etc.
To: dave@farber.net

Dave,

I have a few comments on the Dec 25 advisory on meat.

1) Beef and other meats.

Salami and Bologna are traditionally made with pork. It may be a good idea
to check that they still are. Kosher versions certainly aren't, and may
contain ground beef.  This is important because it took 300+ years in the
wild and decades of trying by artificial means to get scrapie, the
traditional British prion disease, to jump the species barrier from goats to
(bovine) cattle, but it looks like the barrier was not terribly high between
cattle and humans.  On the other hand, it seems that hogs and poultry are
much less receptive to this exciting biological innovation.  Likewise, cats
die of it, but dogs don't.


2) On cooking and disposal

Rendered carcasses are ground, steamed, dehydrated etc. reaching
temperatures way in excess of home cooking.  I.e. cows get BSE from eating
"well done" portions of their dead sisters. Prions are so stable that
burning is the only "surefire" way of destroying them. In variousy European
countries cement kilns have been retrofitted to burn cow-based fuels.  It
works like this:

- cows are rendered in the traditional rendering plants, removing most of
the water

- the output is fluid fat and dry meal; in this state, a cow can be kept for
a long time without generating much cost, especially on feed, as it is dead;
meal can be kept in many different kinds of storage facilities, while fat
can be stored in the same facilities used for liquid petroleum products;
this allows for more leisurely and environmentally benign funeral
arrangements

- both meal and fat are shipped to cement plants and stored separately

- meal is air-sprayed into the rotary kiln flame using the same kind of
equipment as for coal powder

- fat is likewise sprayed using the same kind of gear used for liquid fuels.

The kiln flame equipment often contains several channels for injecting coal,
oil, or gas.  The cowfuel lines are just added or converted from some of the
existing lines.  Fat is a very good fuel, meal is not, but adds a bit of
heat anyway.  Both are always injected in combination with traditional
fuels, and account for only a fraction of the energy used by the kiln.

The attraction of the cement process is that gases reach 2000 deg Celsius
and keep the temperature for many seconds, and then mix with finely powdered
minerals being sintered into klinker, which ensures complete molecular
destruction, and a pretty good capture of the byproducts in a stable stony
matrix.  If the plant is properly tuned up, what comes out is just water -
and a huge amount of carbon dioxide.

European cement makers made good money disposing of the cows, as they still
do burning a number of other nasty stuffs.

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