JUN 03

Chicken and soybean circuit boards? sounds delicious.

I am very concerned that if this technology takes off, that circuit boards could become a vector for transferring diseases carried by birds. There are many:

Psittacine beak and feather disease, avian bird flu, infectious bursal disease, Newcastle disease, chlamydiosis, proventricular dilatation and many others.

What guarantee do we have that when these circuit boards are mass produced in China that the feathers will not be properly processed and sterilized, leading to world wide outbreaks?

Really impressive! It's another step in the right direction!

@Mr. Garum: It's unlikely in the extreme that any disease could survive the rendering-process. When I first read about feather-based plastics a few years ago (I believe it was in New Scientist Magazine, but I'm not certain), it was described that the feathers were pretty much boiled down into a slurry in order to make a consistent, smooth paste. I very much doubt there is a virus on this planet that could survive those temperatures for long! If there are, we'd be in a lot of trouble. The heat is over a protracted time at high temperature- I may need to go looking for the actual degrees C used, but I recall the article saying it was around the boiling temp of water at least- more than enough to kill H1N1, for example.

I hope that is somewhat reassuring. I, for one, cheer on this possibility of a new way to make circuit-boards. The less petroleum we need to make our stuff, the better! I've already committed to buying a wholly-electric car- but those ubiquitous plastics were a huge hurdle that I couldn't figure out a solution for in replacing them, other than glass (which can endlessly re-used). This will be an amazing boon to the plastics industry, if this company doesn't get squashed before they can prove their concept.

I prefer reliability and durability. Let the green rely on ouija boards for interweb updates.

@mee: I suppose, that if enough people poo-poo this concept *cough*-big-oil-corporations-*cough*, it'll fade quietly into the background, like so many others, but when your precious clucking oil is all gone, I'm sure you'll be one of the first barking about "why didn't you guys come up with a solution before this could happen?"

In other words, finding solutions now, testing them for that reliability and so on, NOW, is a good idea, and one we should have been working on years ago. Oh, wait- they HAVE been: this tech is at least five years old, at the moment. We don't have time to fart around looking for more oil- "peak oil" is here- and we need to learn how to keep our level of "civilization" and yet not completely rape this planet while we do it.

One day, you'll understand that being "green" isn't a lunatic's choice, it's the only choice, if you want to survive at a level somewhere above that of a Stone-Age tribesman.

Viruses from circuit boards . . . .
That makes me smile

Now there's another reason to help the urban chicken coop movement expand. http://greenlandlady.com/site/...-movement/

I really wasn't aware that chicken feathers were such a waste problem? If we've got so many of these feathers, why don't we ever have chicken down pillows etc. instead of goose down?

I've been hearing about this for quite a while. I don't think it will every surface. It could have perhaps worked for the primitive circuit boards of the 60s and 70s, but now the circuit boards are much thinner and multilayered. They need an extreme purity that feathers just cannot provide.

It's a cool idea though.....

--Dave