Waste not, want not... burrrrpppppp!

Roughly 50% of all of the food you see in the grocery aisle will never be eaten. While most of it will be bought, much of those purchases will never make it past the teeth. Then, of course, of that which is eaten, another 25% passes through undigested and flushed away.

What a waste, on so many levels!

The discarded food scraps, what happens to those? Well, about 95% ends up in municipal sanitary landfills or in municipal trash incinerators. The landfill companies will tell you that they capture landfill gas, or they recover energy from the heated gases in the incinerator. But, in truth, much of the energy inherently present in the food is gased off, mostly to the atmosphere as greenhouse gases and wasted heat.

BioCycle Magazine, a publication of family-owned JG Press, in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, concluded on April 15, 2010, its West Coast conference, the focus of which was largely the production of soil amendments and useful energy from the processing of wasted food. Anaerobic digestion and composting are the principal proven technologies for accomplishing this feat.

Europe, and Germany in particular, is way ahead of the United States in responsibly managing food scraps. Much of this advance arises from the use in Europe of energy price subsidies on electricity and gas derived from organic wastes and from the ban of such wastes in landfills.

In the United States, with carbon trading or carbon taxes unlikely to appear in the next year, and with an economy a bust (meaning less material to the landfills and price competition among operators) and with improved natural gas recovery methods depressing the price of gas, conditions necessary to support investments in technology to recover energy from food are poor.

Nevertheless, it makes so much darn sense that our communities every where should embark on programs to recover food scraps. Digestion produces a biogas for electricity, space heating and vehicle fuel, and composting produces a soil amendment for restoring our urban soils for local agricultural output. These ventures mean green jobs and meaningful greenhouse gas reduction.

Sometimes, the best ideas, though not justifiable on a typical return on financial investment basis, deserve investment for their return on a community investment. Every family can be part of the effort, and every community can benefit from the results.

Capturing the gas!

Global climate change, greenhouse gases, cap-and-trade... these topics are reported daily on the media.
The serious business of managing emissions of climate-altering gases has hardly begun moving. The enormity of the task, as the 350 rallies on 10/24 highlighted, is almost enough to paralyze citizens and the politicians who represent them. We don't know where to start.
So, let's start with the most basic... the FOOD WE EAT.
Our bodies are "digesters," as we exhale we give off CO2, a byproduct of assimilating food, and as we emit flatulence, we give off CH4, methane.
This is no different that the function of the compost pile, the oft-cited methane from cow farts, and the escaped gases from landfills.
While we have little control over bodily functions, we can take responsibility for the manner in which organic waste is handled. Putting organic waste into tanks in the absence of oxygen compels decomposition by microorganism along reducing, as opposed to oxidizing, pathways. A "reduced" carbon originating from microbial decomposition of carbohydrate is methane gas. Methane is "natural gas," and can be stored and transported for use in heating and electrical generation. The "oxidation" of methane is the blue flame on the stove, but it can also be the fuel for hot water heater, furnaces, and for running engine generators for electricity.
So, let's reduce reliance on fossil natural gas sources by delivering our food and body wastes to anaerobic digesters for recovery of methane biogas.