Progress on the Methane Digestion Facility

     First of all, it might be important to figure out why I am choosing anaerobic digestion of food waste for Sarah Lawrence College. I have travelled around a bit to learn about composting. You will see posts about my talks there before long I recorded my observations. Basically, I learned that all large-scale composting facilities require large, upfront costs. Windrow Composting requires a good deal less upfront costs but requires a lot more space and land that is just not available on Sarah Lawrence College, and additional land adjoining the college is just not available. There is plenty of talk among the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College about shipping food waste to a composting facility off campus to a rural area perhaps a few hour drive away, however, transportation costs are very high for any kind of waste out there (Transportation of garbage is 2/3 of the cost of waste management), and it also uses fossil fuel to transport compost. In addition, keeping our composting facility on campus also allows better transparency of our facility to make sure it is really doing something good for the environment. A facility right on campus that students can see and visit the same way they can see and visit a professor makes it inherently much more transparent and let me add, an excellent education opportunity for chemistry, biology, environmental studies, painting, photography, even a business course, countless conference projects, and much much more. If the facility were located somewhere far away, none of this would be feasible. Colleges are in the educational field are the not? What could be better for a college than having a progressive, liberal arts college educate the public on what will soon be the wave of the future? It would also be nice to use some compost for beautifying the college and even to supply some to places like Warren Green, and Laura's new-found garden.
     However, upfront costs of a composting system that also takes up a lot of land are very high. Therefore, if you were to pay say... 100,000 dollars for a facility wouldn't it make sense to pay for a facility that made two sources of revenue to pay itself off rather than say... one source? Methane digestion will produce energy to heat and power Sarah Lawrence College, IN ADDITION to producing valuable compost. Not to mention the fact that aerobic composting requires tons of energy to turn the food waste as I learned from my travels, while methane digestion PRODUCES energy and can even be buried underground so as not to take up very much space on campus. SLC already has a boiler system so connecting it to a heating system powered by methane would be a simple process. In fact, we may be able to use methane to produce electricity and use excess heat from that to help heat up water to heat all of the buildings.
     I also am working on a large-scale worm composting facility that can compost the final product of the methane digestion facility. The worms will transform this nutrient-rich substance into a high-quality compost that sells at a high price. This would work very well for wealthy homeowners in Bronxville New York.
     With all that said, there is a list of goals and priorities to get to the grand prize-a large-scale methane digestion facility that can compost all of SLC's food waste.