The centerpiece of the Pennsylvania Farm Show will be turned into green energy.
This story in the Centre Daily Times (State College, PA) says the show starts tomorrow (Saturday), and a 900-pound butter sculpture of a cow and a school bus with three children boarding the bus made for the eight-day show will be recycled into biodiesel:
The sculpture will be chopped into pieces, melted and turned into biodiesel by students at State College Area High School and Penn State — another project by the local school and university aimed at teaching kids how to turn waste into alternative fuels. “The key thing about these projects here is that the generation of people in school now is the generation that is going to have to find the solution to the energy crisis,” said Glen Cauffman, manager of farms and facilities at Penn State’s College of Agricultural Science.
This year’s butter masterpiece by Jim Victor, of Conshohocken, is the largest created in the 17 years the butter sculptures have been on display at the Farm Show, said Jessica Pomraning, public relations manager of the Mid-Atlantic Dairy Association, a sponsors of the sculptures.
In the past, the butter had been thrown away.
“Rather than just discarding it,” she said, the association began donating it for alternative fuel. Last year’s Ben Franklin and Liberty Bell sculpture went to Philadelphia Fry-O-Diesel, Inc., which turned it into biodiesel.
Penn State is already a big biodiesel supporter already converting all of its regular diesel-powered equipment to run on a 20 percent biodiesel mix.