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There is a scene at the end of the movie Back to the Future in which Doc Emmett Brown returns from the far future in his time-traveling DeLorean to get Marty McFly. Before going forward in time to save Marty's family, Doc Brown stuffs with apple cores and diet soda the Mr. Fusion machine now powering his DeLorean. It's a step up from the stolen plutonium or captured lightning required earlier in the film to produce the 1.21 gigawatts of power needed for time travel. Yet as we in 2008 look at $130-per-barrel oil, there are those who argue that our energy independence can be found, just like Doc Brown's, in trash. What if they are correct?

A couple weeks ago I wrote a column about SwiftFuel, a non-petroleum gasoline substitute made from biomass and proposed as an alternative to aviation gasoline. Every column generates mail not just from skeptics, but also from enthusiasts and true believers. Among this latter group is the father-son team of Eric and Andrew Day from western Massachusetts pushing their particular version of trash-to-power, which they call the Day Cycle, after themselves. I think their ideas have merit and ought to, at the very least, provoke a lot of good thinking from this audience.

But before we get to the Day Cycle, let's consider the role in our culture of what I'm choosing to call "miracle cures." Based on the medical analogy of wonder drugs that cure easily what was previously incurable, I think this concept can be applied broadly to most areas of scientific inquiry. A miracle cure comes along, appears generally to do what is claimed -- problem solved, right?

Not usually.

It's rare that any bad news is simple and without nuance. Longtime readers will recall that I've been working for six years now trying to end Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), which claimed our son Chase back in 2002. People contact me all the time with reports of a "cure" for SIDS, but I know that SIDS isn't just one condition but several lumped together under the name "SIDS." I believe most alternative energy technologies ought to be approached similarly. The Day Cycle, while having some merit, won't put Saudi Arabia out of the oil business or even put the United States directly into a state of energy self-sufficiency. The Day Cycle is just one part of a comprehensive rework of the ways we make and use energy that can have the eventual effect of making us in large part energy self-sufficient. It's just one piece of a very big puzzle.

The challenge of the Day Cycle is profound: to solve at once the problems of how to power our society and what to do with all of our garbage, all without making the world worse for the effort, which is to say without increasing the problems of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

I don't want to have a global warming debate here. For the purposes of the Day Cycle, it simply doesn't matter. If what the Days propose will get rid of our garbage, create usable fuel and power, and, by the way, doesn't cause any net increase of greenhouse gas emissions, that's good, right? Even those who don't believe in global warming (and I hear from them all) probably aren't specifically IN FAVOR of greenhouse gas emissions -- gas for the sake of gas. They just don't believe in global warming. That argument is not what we are about here.

What we ARE about here are the 251 million tons of municipal waste that we as Americans created in 2005, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and the 5.1 billion barrels of oil we imported that same year, according to the Department of Energy.

Until the late 1960s most American cities burned their trash, which was highly efficient at reducing the trash volume by more than 90 percent, yielding ash that was relatively small and easy to dispose of under the prevalent rules of that time. Then came the Clean Air Act, which made burning asbestos and DDT and PCBs and various heavy metals a no-no, so we started burying our trash in landfills, which requires a lot more effort and a lot more land -- so much land that many large cities are running out of places to stash their trash. Recycling helps reduce the volume of trash, but it requires labor, costs more than it earns, and most of the stuff that could be recycled is missed. We need something better than burying our trash in landfills.

As an aside, many products that were designed in the 1960s for easy incineration are designed today for easier digestion in landfills. Disposable diapers are a good example of such a product.

Eric and Andrew Day propose going back to burning our trash, but instead of using open-air incinerators or even high-temperature Basic Oxygen furnaces, they like the idea of burning our crap in electric plasma furnaces at temperatures in excess of 15,000 degrees Celsius. Take everything that would have gone to the landfill, add to it, if you like, everything that would have been recycled, and even leave in the really bad stuff like medical waste, toxic waste, heavy metals, and radioactive waste. Grind it all up into little chunks, some of which could be in a chemical or water slurry, and pump it into the plasma furnace.

Plasma furnaces have been around for decades and are already used for disposing of medical waste in Japan. Most such furnaces are fairly small, though the Days have found one manufacturer that can make a plasma furnace capable of burning 100 tons of trash per day.

The plasma furnace, operating in a closed loop, generates a form of synthetic gas that can be burned as a fuel as well as a glasslike inert material that can be used as aggregate in concrete. That's what happens when you run your Pampers and plutonium and anthrax and last Sunday's chicken dinner through a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit flame that breaks everything down to single atoms. The manufacturer of the plasma furnace (it's in this week's links) says the syngas can be burned to generate more power than the furnace uses, making it self-sufficient. The Days go much further in their claims, but then they want to make the BIG BUCKS. They say the furnace can be optimized to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

Dividing 251 million tons of municipal trash by 365 days by 100 tons per furnace says we'll need 7,000 such furnaces to burn all of America's trash. That doesn't really sound like a lot of furnaces to me, when you consider that's about how many landfills we have today and about how many municipal trash incinerators we used to have. Moving to this method of waste disposal and energy generation is a no-brainer... if it works.

There's that big "if" -- if it works. I fear the plasma furnaces will get clogged, but if they don't then the result is pretty darned amazing. Here is what the Days propose to do with that plasma furnace and the chemical plant they'll build around it. The purpose of the system is to simultaneously produce hydrogen, electricity, oxygen, biofuels/biomass, syngas, and other useful products from waste.

Now, with one of the heroic oversimplifications I am known for, I'll explain that the rest of the Day Cycle involves injecting steam into the syngas to create even more hydrogen along with lots of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide can be used to grow algae, yielding both biomass and oxygen in copious amounts. The final outputs of the plant are whatever can be made from the algae (biodiesel, ethanol, or -- what the heck -- SwiftFuel). All heat is recycled, no carbon dioxide is released (that's the theory) and all that gets pumped out of the plant is some excess electricity (not sure how much of that), hydrogen, all those algae products, and of course oxygen.

Their claimed net production from each ton of municipal solid waste:

112 pounds of hydrogen
55 gallons of biodiesel
a little electricity
926 pounds of oxygen

The potential impact of all these products is significant, though not in themselves enough to eliminate the need for energy imports. I have real doubts about hydrogen-powered transportation and tend to believe that the best use for that hydrogen is simply for generating electricity at the sewage treatment plant which is, by the very nature of sewage, close to the population, and can be pumped into the electricity grid.

Multiply all these numbers by 251 million tons of solid waste and convert them, where possible, into equivalent barrels of oil and it comes down to about 2.6 billion barrels per year if all waste treatment facilities were so converted. That's half of our current oil import volume -- enough to substantially destabilize the international oil market if that's the goal.

Will this work? I don't know. But making energy from what we'd normally just transport and bury makes sense to me.

When you open up your Internet browser, what’s the first thing you see? Many people opt for personalized start pages, portal-like websites that let you pick and choose the content you want, such as news, weather or updates from social networking sites like Facebook. You can add widgets to your start page, and even create widgets for others to use on their pages.

These sites incorporate Ajax programming, which lets you easily customize the page, moving content from one area to another, while also speeding up the page’s load time. These start pages are popular with a lot of folks, but they’ve never worked for me for a variety of reasons (I’ll get to those in a moment).

First, the back story. Personalized start pages have been around for several years but really took off in 2006, when several players appeared on the scene, among them Netvibes (which Mark reviewed back in 2006) and Pageflakes. That same year Google launched their own personalized start page called iGoogle, with the first widgets added to the page around that year’s World Cup. Since then, more and more services have appeared on the scene, with mixed results.

So why haven’t I become a regular user of personalized start pages? And why haven’t they become successful businesses? Let me count the ways:

1. Widget appeal is fleeting.

I must admit I’m not a fan of widgets, those mini-applications that run on social networking sites, blogs and start pages. The concept seems really cool for a couple of hours, but that’s about how long they’ve lasted for me. On iGoogle, many of the widgets I originally installed don’t work anymore, and others, such as games, take way too long to load in the first place. While I agree that they can be useful, they just aren’t useful enough to keep me coming back to a start page.

2. Too much me in one place.

The idea of updating or checking other people’s updates from social networking sites or reading feeds from newspapers on a start page brings us back to the topic of aggregation. It’s a subject I’ve covered before in a previous post about social aggregation services such as FriendFeed. Instead of visiting various sites, you can use social networks and read the news without leaving your start page.

The offer of centralizing information in one place is catching on as sites such as Twitter, Flickr, etc., have included this functionality seamlessly when you sign up. In theory, I see the appeal of having everything I follow online in one central place. But a start page can’t accommodate all the things I read and do online without becoming overwhelming. I tried adding all the things I cared about to Netvibes and Pageflakes start pages and it ended up looking like something I’d rather run away from than embrace. Like my experience with FriendFeed, it’s too much of me in one place for me to handle.

3. They seem like features, not stand-alone businesses.

Two years after the onset of the personalized start page bubble, most of these services are still around. But I wonder for how long. From a business standpoint, the beauty of these services is that they are content portals without having to provide any of the content, which is funneled in from other sources. But as stand-alone businesses — as opposed to a feature, such is what iGoogle is to Google — they don’t seem to have much traction. Recently, one of the more popular services, Pageflakes, ran into financial trouble /and was acquired by Live Universe.

Start pages built from the ground up can’t seem to compete with the big boys such as My Yahoo and iGoogle, so I wonder how long the variety in this space will last. For many people, it’s just too easy to use a service already integrated into a suite of services they already use — provided by Google or Yahoo. Plus, as TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld wrote: “What will the half-life of start pages be in a Friendfeed world?” Schonfeld noted that:

comScore measured only 50,000 unique U.S. visitors [for Pageflakes] in March 2008, compared to 1.4 million for competitor Netvibes. iGoogle had 7.4 million U.S. visitors in March, and My Yahoo had 19 million.

4. I can’t find a real use for them.

I’m always in such a hurry to find what I want when I go online, and I’m a creature of habit. So when I use one of these personalized start pages, I end up ignoring what’s there and just cutting to chase with a Google search or a visit to my RSS news-feed reader. As for using it to get news, well, that’s what the feed reader is for, and it does the job a lot more effectively.

On the Other Hand…

There are some reasons why these services might just stick around despite my resistance. Among them is the customized media diet we are getting more and more used to these days, and the fact that readers are less attracted to stories than they are to headlines. Here are a few reasons personalized start pages might just catch fire.

1. People gravitate to aggregation.

I assumed that people who work on the Internet, like me, would have less of an interest in these services than people who only occasionally consult the web for news and entertainment, so I asked a couple of other people what they thought.

I posted a question to my Twitter followers: “How many of you use these services and why?” I found quite a few people who use and enjoy personalized start pages for a variety of reasons. Among them were the ability to update their statuses on services like Twitter directly from the start pages, or put only the most important news to them in one place, while using RSS feed readers to get less important news.

Some people said that start pages influenced and streamlined the way they interact with other sites. For instance, updating on Netvibes means you don’t have to visit the Twitter website, but seeing a headline often compels you to click through to read the whole news story on the source site.

2. The trend toward me-focused media.

Some people want less editorial intervention and more of themselves in the media they consume. In contemplating the appeal of personalized start pages, I couldn’t help but compare it to the draw of a D.I.Y. magazine or newspaper. Early versions of personalized online papers have been around since the ’90s, with notable projects such as CRAYON leading the way.

The concept of The Daily Me — personalized news publications built around one’s own interest — dovetails nicely with personalized start pages. Services like customizable news site DailyMe.com or The New York Times’ MyTimes are more news-oriented than the start pages I’ve mentioned, but also attempt to deliver highly customized content.

3. Our love for snacking on headlines, not stories.

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about how our inability to wait and our short attention spans — possibly made shorter by high-speed Internet, tabbed browsing and a seemingly endless stream of Web 2.0 sites. Instead of longer, more in-depth stories, studies show that what most readers want these days are news bites and headlines.

This trend toward brevity might be a good thing for the personalized start page, which serves up just that: a headline and a two- to four-line intro. Sites such as Pageflakes make it extra easy to get the point of a news piece without actually having to read it. If the headline reads “John Mayer’s Ex ‘Happy’ About His New Romance,” a mere mouse-over of the text gives a subhead telling you who the ex is and who the new romance is. I guess with stories like this, you don’t need anything more than that — and really, who has time for more? (Uh, except for our long-attention-span readers at MediaShift, of course.)

What do you think? Do you use personalized start pages? Why or why not? What do they provide that you don’t get from just visiting a news site or a social networking site — or using a RSS reader? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo is the associate editor of PBS MediaShift. She is a writer, blogger and marketer, who also covers Latino cultural issues at VivirLatino.

Pageflakes image by Paul Jacobson and Christ and Deep Thoughts widgets image by Manuel W., both on Flickr.

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