This city in France is partly powered by cheese, moving there immediately
As children, we thought about living in effervescent castles built of sunshine and rainbows and populated with Lisa Frank animals. As we got older, our qualifications for finding a great place to live got a little more lax (generally boiling down to, will I actually be able to live after paying rent). But there’s a magical place that satisfies both your childhood and adult living dreams: Albertville, France, a city that runs on cheese.
That’s not a euphemism or a moment of wish fulfillment: Albertville, located in the Beaufort region of France, has built a power plant that runs on whey, a byproduct of the cheese-making process. (And oh, does Beaufort make a lot of cheese.) Through the magical process of ~*science*~ (or rather, capturing the methane gas given out by whey), the city is able to divert some of its electricity production processing to something a little greener and, er, gassier.
The plant’s power-supplying output currently covers about 7% of the population’s power needs, but considering that these types of food-to-fuel enterprises are few and far between (Smithsonian covered a New York yogurt plant that does a similar thing), new movement and implementation of these ideas will hopefully lead to more recycling efforts like Albertville’s. Until then, we’ll be planning a trip to southern France to, uh, help support the local cheese industry’s environmental efforts.
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Image via Shutterstock.