Schools, campuses, food and beverage producers, and food banks all produce thousandsof pounds of food waste each year, and typically have to pay to have the waste hauled to a central location such as a landfill. In landfills, organic matterbreaks down and produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas that, if captured, can bea valuable source of energy.
Enter Impact Bioenergy: the companys small anaerobic digester systems, or microdigesters, convert food waste and other organic matter like paper and yard clippings into fertilizer and energy in the form of electricity, heat, and even transportation fuels.
As the companys 33-year-old co-founder Srirup Kumar explained to Conscious Company, Americans typically waste roughly one-third of our food, while one in six families in America lacks a secure supply of healthy food. Bytransforming food waste to a food resource, we can do better than this while doing right for our environment.
Using the companys microdigester, 10 pounds of food waste can be converted to between one and two kilowatt-hours of electricity and a gallon of liquid fertilizer. By diverting waste, avoiding transportation emissions from hauling waste, generating renewable energy, and return- ing nutrients to the soil, these on-site and portable systems provide a truly holistic solution to the food waste problem and help close the loop for the local food movement.
Impact Bioenergy is also democratizing food waste processing through a service it calls Community Supported Biocycling, or CSB, which is inspired by the cooperative model. By selling the three separate value-streams created by its microdigesters food waste processing, renewableenergy, and soil fertilizer to community stakeholders, Impact Bioenergy can provide a hyperlocal solutionto the food waste problem. Its firstCSB demonstration project launched in April of 2015 in partnership with Fremont Brewing Company and Seattle Urban Farm Company.
Looking to the future of thewaste-to-energy eld, Kumar said hebelieves that the waste processing industry will transform from a resource-intensive business to a restorative one. Food waste will becomea commodity, like oil, said Kumar.
One ton of food waste actually has about the same energy content asa barrel of oil, along with plenty of water, nutrients, and organic matter that can be recovered for hyperlocal food systems. Kumar also sees the waste sector becoming decentralized, the same way that computer processing became decentralized as people and businesses transitioned from large mainframes to personal computers and smartphones.
The waste-to-energy industry will under- go decentralization because there are simply too many externalities thathave resulted from the centralized solutions of the 20th century, suchas landfilling. The capacity to upcyclefood waste will be distributed hyper- locally in the 21st century. And as for the up-and-coming generation and how they may adopt solutions like Impact Bioenergys, Kumar said, We [Millennials] have hyperlocal values and we like to internalize externalities. Wasting resources is becoming unthinkable to younger generations, and they are ready to mobilize forpeople, planet, profit, and progress.
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.
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