I doubt that anyone would be surprised to learn that I use news-filtering agents to find stories about Gaithersburg and other topics I cover here. Most often, these come up with references that aren’t really the sorts of things I’d blog here. Beyond the obvious stuff, one finds, for example, lots of government publications (e.g. reports and procurement specs from NIST and the CPSC), and corporate press releases, often from the biotech industry.
However, some of what comes from furthest out in left field are the items that merely quote someone who lives, works or otherwise was physically present in Gaithersburg at the time that they spoke to the reporter. For example, this AP story by David N. Goodman, headlined Manure not just for compost anymore. Quoting:
Home-buyers of tomorrow could find themselves walking across floors made from manure.
That’s no cow pie-in-the-sky dream, according to researchers at Michigan State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture
The concept has its skeptics.
“Is this something you’re going to bring into the house?” asked Steve Fowler, an economist with the Composite Panel Association, a fiberboard-makers trade group based in Gaithersburg, Md.
Well, that certainly was the first I knew that the Composite Panel Association was located in Gaithersburg. It turns out (according to their website) that they’re over in the Airpark, on a cul-de-sac off Beechcraft Ave, so they’re properly in the county, but in the USPS conception of Gaithersburg. I guess that they’re something of a neigh-sayer when it comes to this alternative source of fiber.
In any event, the rest of the article is actually pretty interesting.
“It appears that the fibers interlock with each other better than wood,” said Charles Gould at Michigan State’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Gould and Laurent Matuana, a forestry professor at Michigan State, recently finished a pilot study of manure-based fiberboard, funded by a $5,000 grant from the Michigan Biomass Energy Program.
A draft of the report concluded that fiberboard panels made with processed manure “performed very well in mechanical tests, in many cases meeting or exceeding the standard requirements for particleboard.”
I expect that anything that gives farmers another way to get rid of manure that doesn’t involve it passing into streams and waterways is potentially a good thing.