biogas

Solar CITIES is completing Florida's first community biodigester at the Bishop family farm Rosebud Sustainability Education project. This is the first of three and will be used as a proof of concept and training ground for the entire south, using biogas as the central technology that will include hydroponics, native plants, and Solar energy. USF Patel College students and faculty have been involved and it is hoped that the site will become a living laboratory for best practices in Sustainable Development that will influence the entire region.

You've heard Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner", paraphrased as "Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink".  And you are probably aware that in most parts of the world the contamination of drinking water and other fresh water supplies has a lot to do with toilets.  Poorly designed toilets. Poorly discharged toilets. Poorly treated toilet wastes.

http://www.livescience.com/16713-7-billion-people-world-poop-problem.html

How Green Collar Jobs can reverse the Brain Drain and create a BRAIN GAIN.

By T.H. Culhane, Essen Germany February 15 2011

Background

What’s the best way to give Germans of all socioeconomic backgrounds a tangible stake in fighting for issues like global warming?

Easy: Make it their livelihood. Imagine what would happen if millions of everyday jobs—plus new ones created for people who are currently unemployed—were in fields like renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and green building.

1.  Does biogas pose a climate change hazard? Isn't biogas methane, the same gas that is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide?

2.  Does biogas scale up? Can we use waste water treatment facilities to treat our food wastes?  If so, why wouldn't that be better than trying to do this at the home or community scale.

3. Could biogas be generated IN the kitchen, under the sink for example? Could it be incorporated into new kitchen designs?

(The following questions and answers come from our application to the Clinton Global Initiative and can serve other organization desiring to know more about our work and commitments).

Brief overview of the work of your organization:

Equating a biodigester to an heroic baby dragon, Janice Kelsey and Jody Spangler of Solar CITIES, Inc. will give a simple explanation of biodigestion and how to build a Solar CITIES Design IBC Tank Biodigester to produce cooking fuel and fertilizer using manure and food waste.

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The recent workshop continued work that Culhane had done with the team at Tamera in 2011 when we held a Global Campus workshop to build Tamera's first kitchen-connected Solar CITIES style modified ARTI (Indian floating drum) digester, a delightful living fire breathing dragon now named "Holda".   Holda is  a 4 cubic meter work-horse (play-dragon)  of a biogas system fed on kitchen scraps who (who, not which, since she is alive) has now been in continuous and successful operation for nearly four years, going from a crawling baby to a running toddler.

A year after our Envisaj Mercy team went on the "mother of all biogas tours", a faculty-led service learning expedition  to Israel and Palestine, visiting Eco-gas Isreal and the Palestinian Wildlife Society and introduced our Solar CITIES IBC/ARTI hybrid biodigester to the Green Apprenticeship Program in Kibbutz Lotan, we found ourselves on a "student-led" service learning expedition in the Dominican Republic where several of our Envisaj Mercy club members have family.

Domestic food wastes have been the focus of many environmental remediation efforts, from municipal attempts to encourage source separation and collection to “Do it Yourself” (DIY) and commercial attempts to treat organic residuals on-site through aerobic composting.