An article from the Christian Science Monitor discusses a number of environmentally friendly chemical processes that are being developed to turn waste products into useful material. The most intriguing of these turns poultry waste into light crude oil.

The idea has two interesting effects: first, it finds something useful to do with poultry waste, a substance that has been suspected to cause environmental problems such as water pollution and fisteria; and second, it provides a source of energy that is relatively inexpensive (right now two to three times the cost of drilling) when the cost of waste removal/destruction is taken into account.