From your kitchen waste bucket to your plug socket!
Anaerobic Digestion is a very efficient way of rotting down compostable waste, farmers have been doing it for years with slurry waste in pools and tanks, using the end product on their fields as a fertiliser.
Many local councils facilites also collect kitchen waste for Anaerobic Digestion by specialist companies.
- About a third of household waste is compostable
- British households throw away over 4 million tonnes of food every year
- It's estimated that 30-50% of all food produced worldwide never reaches a human stomach
- Anaerobic Digestion has been used to process sewage sludge since the 19th century
Once collected from your kerbside in special leak proof lorries, kitchen waste gets delivered to a processing tank, it’s collected in a reception pit and pumped into buffer tanks where water is added and the mixture is broken down into small pieces around one centimeter in size.
This waste is then moved to the digester tank, stirred and heated, staying in the tank for 20 – 40 days.
A biogas that is principally Methane is produced in the process and is extracted from the top of the tank and then is used by a combined heat and power gas engine to produce green electricity.
What’s left is a solid residue (fibre or digestate) that is similar to compost and a liquid that can be used as a fertilizer.
