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"In several locations around the globe, communities are already converting things like cow dung, human waste and kitchen garbage into usable energy," writes Jennifer Horton at HowStuffWorks.com. "If you don't focus on the stuff that goes into it, biogas digestion is actually pretty neat. It works by capturing the methane gas that gets released when waste breaks down. Usually, sewage treatment plants just vent that gas into the air, but if methane gas gets captured, it can be used for things like cooking and generating electricity." And the idea is catching on, worldwide.
According to the Beginner's Guide to Biogas, this concept can "provide a clean, easily controlled source of renewable energy from organic waste materials for a small labor input, replacing firewood or fossil fuels (which are becoming more expensive as supply falls behind demand). During the conversion process pathogen levels are reduced and plant nutrients made more readily available, so better crops can be grown while existing resources are conserved."
Here's a rough idea of how it happens:
- Barn: Slurry of manure is washed and scraped from cow stalls into a series of sewage pipes that run under the barn. The manure is mixed with other food wastes.
- Digester: The slurry is heated to around 37 degrees and kept at that level for the five days needed for the microbes to decompose the cow dung. This process gives off methane gas, which bubbles through the slurry and is collected at the top.
- Diesel Generator: The gas runs to the generator, where it is burned to produce electricity to power the digester and the farm, and to feed into the grid.
- Solids Separator: Leftover liquids are used as fertilizer and the solids are strained to make a material to be used as bedding for the cows.
Now if they only stopped slaughtering and eating the cows, we'd be getting somewhere.
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From Kitchen Scraps to Biogas—Stockholm Embraces Garbage Disposals
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