But they need not, they SHOULD not be wasted. And they SHOULDN'T be making a mess or hurting anybody. They are at the core of our biggest problems -- cholera, typhoid, dysentery, rats and roaches and other disease and disruption causing "vermin" (remember learning about the BUBONIC PLAGUE!). But they can EASILY and SAFELY be rendered harmless and transformed into valuable fuel and fertilizer, and this transformation can be done AT HOME. It can be done at the local level. It could be done and should be done at our SCHOOLS. This simple intervention and the know-how surrounding it, should be at the core of our solution set, too!
As a National Geographic Explorer and Professor at the Patel College of Global Sustainability at the University of South Florida teaching circular economy/zero waste concepts as the director of our Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Program I am frequently asked what the most effective Drawdown Solutions are that we can implement in our own lives. I always turn to Drawdown Solution #3: "Eliminate food waste". If food waste were a country, it is said, it would be the third largest emitter of the greenhouse gases causing anthropogenic global warming. The contamination food waste and toilet waste cause form the core of our problems with contaminated materials that defy recycling.
Schools could help solve this problem. In a BIG way. There is all this talk about "recycling not working" and "corporate greenwashing" and the public is understandably upset. Nobody seems to know what to do. At the same time there is furious debate about what we should be teaching in our schools and endless handwringing about "standards" and the "COMMON CORE".
Schools could help solve this problem. In a BIG way. There is all this talk about "recycling not working" and "corporate greenwashing" and the public is understandably upset. Nobody seems to know what to do. At the same time there is furious debate about what we should be teaching in our schools and endless handwringing about "standards" and the "COMMON CORE".
My answer is simple: teach people how to end the threats posed by OUR OWN "organic residuals" once and for all. Teach them how to completely eliminate their own food and toilet wastes, which are really wasted resources, and teach them how they, how WE, as so-called "consumers", can be part of the solution instead of always being blamed as the problem.
The fact is that so-called "production residuals" AND "consumption residuals", which are often called "pre-consumer" and "post-consumer" wastes, when they are organic -- that is, all the wasted material we generate when we prepare our meals, and everything that results from the eating of those meals, from what you eat and what you don't, can be turned into value, not just through composting, which works but faces all sorts of restrictions -- you'll hear lasagna layer compost people insist you can't use meat and dairy, and vermiposting people telling you not to put in citrus or tomatoes -- but through biodigestion or "anaerobic digestion", which can effectively take ALL organic wastes with the sole exception of lignocellulose (branches and brown leaves and wood chips). In fact, it has been demonstrated that with a home or community biodigester you can turn all the "wet-wastes" into fuel and fertilizer and, by pouring the LIQUID COMPOST that comes out of a biodigester onto the yard wastes, accelerate their decomposition so that "everything once alive" can be returned to the soil or used to replace fossil fuels.
This isn't any longer a fringe thing, or a DIY thing or a "farm thing" or an "industrial thing". I've been working with HomeBiogas, the visionary start-up based in Israel, since before they started, and a plethora of other commercial biodigester suppliers from India, China and Africa, for over 15 years. For all those years I've been a "biogas innoventor and practitioner" working with Universities and Governments and Non-Governmental Organizations and National Geographic as a thought-leader in this field, teaching folks through my own NGO "Solar CITIES Biogas Education" how to build their own systems from local materials in places as diverse as the Okavanga Delta in Botswana, to help end human/wildlife conflict, to high schools and colleges in Alaska, to understand better how to work in symbiosis with the microbial world to solve our trash problems.
Home biogas is a proven technology, and the commercial HomeBiogas units I go around the world installing, demonstrating and teaching about are ISO rated (ISO 23590) and CE listed. They come in a small pair of boxes that we've fit in a taxi and on the seat next to us on buses throughout Israel and Palestine and Jordan, take only an hour or two to set up and need no special tools.
The fact is that so-called "production residuals" AND "consumption residuals", which are often called "pre-consumer" and "post-consumer" wastes, when they are organic -- that is, all the wasted material we generate when we prepare our meals, and everything that results from the eating of those meals, from what you eat and what you don't, can be turned into value, not just through composting, which works but faces all sorts of restrictions -- you'll hear lasagna layer compost people insist you can't use meat and dairy, and vermiposting people telling you not to put in citrus or tomatoes -- but through biodigestion or "anaerobic digestion", which can effectively take ALL organic wastes with the sole exception of lignocellulose (branches and brown leaves and wood chips). In fact, it has been demonstrated that with a home or community biodigester you can turn all the "wet-wastes" into fuel and fertilizer and, by pouring the LIQUID COMPOST that comes out of a biodigester onto the yard wastes, accelerate their decomposition so that "everything once alive" can be returned to the soil or used to replace fossil fuels.
This isn't any longer a fringe thing, or a DIY thing or a "farm thing" or an "industrial thing". I've been working with HomeBiogas, the visionary start-up based in Israel, since before they started, and a plethora of other commercial biodigester suppliers from India, China and Africa, for over 15 years. For all those years I've been a "biogas innoventor and practitioner" working with Universities and Governments and Non-Governmental Organizations and National Geographic as a thought-leader in this field, teaching folks through my own NGO "Solar CITIES Biogas Education" how to build their own systems from local materials in places as diverse as the Okavanga Delta in Botswana, to help end human/wildlife conflict, to high schools and colleges in Alaska, to understand better how to work in symbiosis with the microbial world to solve our trash problems.
Home biogas is a proven technology, and the commercial HomeBiogas units I go around the world installing, demonstrating and teaching about are ISO rated (ISO 23590) and CE listed. They come in a small pair of boxes that we've fit in a taxi and on the seat next to us on buses throughout Israel and Palestine and Jordan, take only an hour or two to set up and need no special tools.
So why aren't we ALL doing it, since so clearly we all CAN?
As a science teacher at all levels, K-Adult, teaching around the world for 35 years (10 of them in the inner city schools of Los Angeles with "at-risk" youth) I have to blame the schools. With all this talk over the decades about "standards" and "improving core competencies" we have somehow left out the true common core that unites us all -- our personal impact on our environments -- and the core competency we need to co-create a livable future -- the ability to easily transform our personal wastes from problem into solution.
While we have been bickering over how to teach "the three R's" -- "reading, wRiting and aRithmatic" -- we've obviously ignored any in depth or meaningful approach that helps students and citizens "Reduce, Re-Use, and Recycle".
Oh sure, we pay lip service to the concept. Some schools valiantly set up recycle bins -- bins that inevitably overflow with dirty styrofoam clamshells and soiled paper plates and stinky goo-filled ketchup and mustard and mayo packets. Nobody is convinced that recycling works (or rather they are being convinced that it doesn't by those who profit from current linear, "cradle-to-grave", waste-bin-to-landfill and toilet-to-waste-treatment-facility processes) , but students are always hopeful about the possibilities of a recycling economy and usually upset that their "elders" don't seem to know how to design systems that would make for a guilt free cafeteria, kitchen and bathroom experience.
Home biogas is a tangible, low-cost, highly effective way to give social proof to the technical concept of a circular economy, and it should not just be talked ABOUT and thought about in the schools (where most people have still never heard of it, even decades after teachers like me have gone out into the world like missionaries, apostles of the "gospel" -- "good news" -- of microbial transduction of "bads" into "goods") but DONE ABOUT.
At the Patel College in Florida where I have been teaching people how to BUILD THEIR OWN home scale biogas systems for 3/4 of a decade, and at Mercy College, NY before that, where I built what we believe to have been the first winter climate compatible INDOOR biodigesters the world had ever seen back in 2012, we pride ourselves in being "not just think tanks, but DO tanks".
But most schools don't even teach about the uniquely effective and simple biodigester solution, much less implement it.
This is why we at our educational NGO Solar C3ITIES ("Connecting Community Catalysts Integrating Industrial Ecology Solutions) and the team at HomeBiogas are working with school systems and lobbying to get the science and engineering of biodigester systems front and center as the most effective of STEM education initiatives and firmly positioned at the center of the COMMON CORE.
Over the past 15 years, running workshops around the world, building mini-digesters out of 5 gallon water jugs and paint buckets and Pickle Barrels with students and teachers in places as diverse as Eco-villages in Europe and Bethlehem in Palestine and Punahou High and the Indigenous Community Center in Hawaii and Dublin Castle and the Men's Sheds to help the poor in Ireland, we've come to see biodigesters as what I call "THE SOLAR PLEXUS of THE FOOD/ENERGY/WATER NEXUS".
They are and should be the literal and figurative GUTS of any STEM education initiative because
A) Biogas is literally a form of accessible and useful SOLAR ENERGY and all units on renewable energy and solar energy can benefit from student understanding of how the sun's radiation starts the life cycle and produces a non-polluting biomass fuel that is endlessly recyclable.
B) Biodigesters are inexpensive and can be built and deployed literally all over the planet to improve both public health and local economies, and satisfy all 17 of the UN Sustainability Goals (SDGs).
C) Biodigesters sit at that nexus between biology, chemistry and physics married to the engineering of appropriate technology and lend themselves to lessons in applied mathematics and computer design and the creation of easy and safe labs that demonstrate human ingenuity and entrepreneurship.
D) The task of explaining and raising awareness about Home biogas involves applied critical thinking, creativity, artistic and presentation skills.
If there were ever any topic around which true "THEMATIC INTERDISCIPLINARY EDUCATION" could be developed, it would be Home Biogas. It provides the launch pad for a curriculum about all the things we truly have in common. It let's us "go with our gut". It starts and ends with our guts. It connects the most up-to-date research into the magic of the microbiome with the early development of the first life-forms on earth. It spans eons from the age of the Archaea, the alpha and the omega of life forms on our planet, through to the creation of a space-faring civilization, it connects the water and the land, it completes the cycle from what we grow to eat to what we eat to what results from our eating back to the soil where we grow what we eat. Through this curriculum students always come spiraling up full circle to the unending circle of life as it extends out to the cosmos.
Through deep reflection and lived experience about how our daily actions and interactions with food and the now-wasted residuals our consumption leaves behind, students can learn to truly feel like they are part of the solution rather than part of the problem and can develop realistic hope for the future. They can finally see that regardless of who we are or where or how we live we all share these common issues and interests surrounding the unnecessary and debilitating problem of organic waste. We lose our fear of a growing population and stop thinking of our presence on this planet as a scourge. We learn that we can all make a POSITIVE difference with every meal, with every trip to the bathroom.
And so that is what we are developing -- the true common core of human experience for the .best common core curriculum to truly spread high standards for human and planetary health and well-being and education out into the world..
I've got a gut feeling that this is the kind of education the world is really looking for.
C) Biodigesters sit at that nexus between biology, chemistry and physics married to the engineering of appropriate technology and lend themselves to lessons in applied mathematics and computer design and the creation of easy and safe labs that demonstrate human ingenuity and entrepreneurship.
D) The task of explaining and raising awareness about Home biogas involves applied critical thinking, creativity, artistic and presentation skills.
If there were ever any topic around which true "THEMATIC INTERDISCIPLINARY EDUCATION" could be developed, it would be Home Biogas. It provides the launch pad for a curriculum about all the things we truly have in common. It let's us "go with our gut". It starts and ends with our guts. It connects the most up-to-date research into the magic of the microbiome with the early development of the first life-forms on earth. It spans eons from the age of the Archaea, the alpha and the omega of life forms on our planet, through to the creation of a space-faring civilization, it connects the water and the land, it completes the cycle from what we grow to eat to what we eat to what results from our eating back to the soil where we grow what we eat. Through this curriculum students always come spiraling up full circle to the unending circle of life as it extends out to the cosmos.
Through deep reflection and lived experience about how our daily actions and interactions with food and the now-wasted residuals our consumption leaves behind, students can learn to truly feel like they are part of the solution rather than part of the problem and can develop realistic hope for the future. They can finally see that regardless of who we are or where or how we live we all share these common issues and interests surrounding the unnecessary and debilitating problem of organic waste. We lose our fear of a growing population and stop thinking of our presence on this planet as a scourge. We learn that we can all make a POSITIVE difference with every meal, with every trip to the bathroom.
And so that is what we are developing -- the true common core of human experience for the .best common core curriculum to truly spread high standards for human and planetary health and well-being and education out into the world..
I've got a gut feeling that this is the kind of education the world is really looking for.
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