Duckweed

Find a reference to duckweed dated earlier than last year, and you’re likely to be seeing complaints about the tiny aquatic plant. Like invasive water hyacinth and other floating plant species, duckweed is capable of quickly carpeting ponds and slow-moving water streams.

However, now it’s being pushed as yet another biofuel savior. Scientists from the North Carolina State University made the discovery when looking at the potential for using the noxious weed as a cleaner of animal waste.

They found that growing the tiny aquatic plant on hog waste-water not only helped to dispose of the hog waste but also produced five to six times more starch per acre than corn, according to university researcher Dr. Jay Cheng.

The possibility of duckweed replacing corn or sugar cane as the world’s source of biofuel would delight environmentalists who contend that the switching of many acres of farmland to grow biofuels has put upward pressure on the price of food in developing countries, leading to food riots and scarcity.

Dr. Cheng said the use of duckweed as waste cleaner and biofuel was a win-win situation.

“We can kill two birds — biofuel production and waste-water treatment — with one stone — duckweed,” he explained, adding that starch from duckweed can be readily converted into ethanol using the same methods currently used for corn biofuel.

Corn remains the country’s most popular source of biofuel but its use has come under fire from critics — not only for food security issues — but also because of the enormous amounts of water needed to grow the crop.

The duckweed would sidestep this issue by utilising it for its growth, along with large scale lagoons of wastewater that are used by pig farms.

“Duckweed could be an environmentally friendly, economically viable feedstock for ethanol,” said Dr. Cheng.

Fellow researcher Dr. Anne-Marie Stomp said the growth of duckweed for biofuel had great potential.

“There’s a bias in agriculture that all the crops that could be discovered have been discovered,” said Dr. Stomp, “but duckweed could be the first of the new, 21st century crops. In the spirit of George Washington Carver, who turned peanuts into a major crop, Jay and I are on a mission to turn duckweed into a new industrial crop, providing an innovative approach to alternative fuel production.”

The research, which is funded by the North Carolina Biofuels Center, was presented on March 21 at the annual conference of the Institute of Biological Engineering in Santa Clara, California.

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