Call to Action for Municipalities

Municipalities can significantly influence global warming by controlling what happens to their waste. Furthermore, they can utilize existing wastewater facilities to convert organic waste to fuel at a low cost or at a profit.

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Food waste originating from people's kitchens or from restaurants are mostly organic material that if landfilled, will emit methane as a result of their biodegradation.

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Clearly every Municipality can help climate change by ensuring that their waste management contractor avoids putting their organic waste into landfills.  This can be contractually negotiated with private waste companies. Compliance can be assured if liquidated damages for noncompliance are included in the contract and the municipality willing to levy them. Even better, to avoid the lobbying of politicians with waste management companies successfully avoiding contractual penalties, the municipality can operate its own facilities to extract organics from waste. Either the waste management company or the municipality could then send the separated organic waste to its own wastewater facility to convert the separated organics stream to a fuel. 

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Wastewater treatment plants are usually municipally owned and generate residual solids from wastewater that is usually treated by anaerobic digestion. This is the process used to generate fuel (Renewable Natural Gas) from waste. These plants can be enabled, at a low cost, to receive food waste and the resulting fuel can be utilized to provide power the plant producing the fuel and the excess fuel can be put into the natural gas grid and sold for profit.  

 

Our call to action for municipalities is:

1. Ensure that organic waste from your municipality doesn't go landfills.

2. Use municipal facilities as much as possible to control the process from separation to conversion of the waste to fuel.  

 

 

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