Diversion of crab bodies from landfill – generation of high value biochar

Abstract

Every year Louisbourg Seafoods Ltd. sends approximately 1000 tons of crab waste to landfills. Transport of this waste material is not only costly for them, but it is also burning a significant amount of fossil fuels. Louisbourg Seafoods Ltd. is currently investing in efforts to identify an environmentally beneficial disposal method for the considerable amount waste generated by processing of snow crab. For every crab processed one third of each crab body will end up in Canadian landfills. A proposed method for this waste stream is to generate biochar. Crab based biochar was generated by slow pyrolysis at 400°C for 4 hours. The generated biochar was fully characterized by FT-IR, BET, XRD, TEM, and GC-MS. The crab biochar was found to have a surface area of 16.3 m2/g by BET analysis. FT-IR and XRD showed there was a significant amount of calcium carbonate in the crab biochar. XRD showed the crystal structure is calcite. A Palladium-Zinc-CaCO3 catalyst was generated to catalyze the hydrogenation of alkynes to alkenes. This catalyst is hypothesized to be stereospecific for the cis-alkene product. The performance of the catalyst was analyzed by a simple hydrogenation of 2-butyne-1,4-diol. The Pd-Zn-CaCO3 catalyst was active, however the product produced was butane-1,4-diol instead of cis-2-butene-1,4-diol. This means the catalyst is not stereospecific in its current state.