Ethanol's drug problem.

AuthorCox, Stan
PositionCorn-ethanol plant by-products

The Food and Drug Administration found recently that samples of a feed by-product from dozens of corn-ethanol plants were contaminated with antibiotics. With that news, producing vehicle fuel from grain is looking not only like a wasteful and inefficient process, but also like a danger to human health.

Growing corn is a leading cause of soil erosion as well as water depletion and pollution. Corn ethanol plants further stress our water supplies by consuming four gallons of water for every gallon of fuel produced. Now to the list of ethanol's environmental insults we can add pharmaceutical pollution.

There's nothing inherently wrong with getting help from biological processes to meet industrial needs. But when colossal volumes of product and enormous profits are at stake, as they are in the alternative fuel industry, biological methods can backfire disastrously.

To survive economically, ethanol plants depend on sales of distillers' grains, solid material left over from corn fermentation. Distillers' grains are a nutritious, high-protein livestock feed. But they can be laced with multiple antibiotics, the FDA and University of Minnesota scientists have found.

Addition of antibiotics is one of several methods ethanol manufacturers use to control bacterial contamination. Bacteria interfere with the work of yeast cultures that convert sugars to ethanol. Antibiotics can increase ethanol output by 1-5%, according to Ethanol Producer magazine.

That sounds small, but that extra efficiency could boost profits by many millions of dollars as national production is scaled up from its current 9 billion gallons per year.

The discovery of antibiotics in distillers' grains has raised concern that ethanol plants could breed and disperse drug-resistant bacteria, and that those bugs could share their genes with bacterial species that cause human diseases. Sampling by university and industry researchers has turned up antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the processing streams of ethanol plants.

This case of pharmaceutical contamination comes on top of a half-century of over-prescribing antibiotics for medical and veterinary use, along with routine feeding of the drugs to healthy livestock to promote growth. Nature's predictable response: bacterial populations that can no longer be killed by drugs that were once used to treat them. Now, of 90,000 Americans who die of bacterial infections each year, more than 60,000 are killed by such drug-resistant types, according...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT