Food waste turned to electricity

I just read this great NPR article on a story featured on PBS News Hour about dairy farmers in MA using food waste from local stores and other waste from their own farms to convert into electricity.

Food waste sent to landfills will create methane gas on it’s own as it breaks down. This is one of the reasons food waste is such a huge problem we need to address.  When you hear people talk about waste, especially food waste, it isn’t just some moral judgement of our excessive lifestyles that we throw too much away. It directly contributes to the degradation of our planets eco system.

This process of using anaerobic digesters uses waste to create methane gas and trap it so it can be used to make electricity. It becomes a closed loop system. The electricity is used to power the machinery creating it, as well as the rest of the farm and much more.

It is not a wholly new concept. There is a reprint of a 1963 Farm Journal story on Mother Earth News about a methane digester.  

And in Europe there are thousands of the anaerobic digesters currently in use. Hopefully, we will see more solutions like this gain more support here in the U.S. 

It is pretty amazing to think of food waste and cows becoming parts of the solution instead of contributions to the problem.