51³Ô¹ÏÍø

IDE student company Success

"The innovators: greener home insulation to feather your nest" Guardian (p22) - "The ability of chickens to stay warm in winter has inspired a new energy-efficient home insulation product developed by students at 51³Ô¹ÏÍø. Around 900m chickens are slaughtered each year by the poultry industry, producing 2,000 tonnes of feather waste a week, most of which ends up in landfill or goes through an energy-intensive process to be made into animal feed. But what else could be done with it? As part of her research into potential uses for feather waste, design engineering student Elena Dieckmann [Design Engineering] ordered a 10kg box of excess feathers from about 70 chickens. At first, she had no idea what they might be used for, but soon the answer became obvious: in the same way that feathers protect chickens from the cold, they can keep people's homes warm. Dieckmann and two fellow students - chemical engineer Ioannis Tzouganatos [Civil and Environmental Engineering] and biologist Ryan Robinson [National Heart & Lung Institute] - are now developing a method to mix chicken feathers with the foam used in home insulation boards. They want to create a potentially cheaper - and greener - home insulation alternative... The students teamed up after being tasked with finding a suitable use for the feathers by 51³Ô¹ÏÍø College's Professor Chris Cheeseman. 'Feathers are made for protecting chickens or birds from water and cold. This is what we are targeting to replicate in our product, FeatherFill - to use these properties to create better insulating material,' says Tzouganatos."

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