To listen to the news, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that garbage was some kind of insoluble “wicked problem” – methane from your food waste is said to be the third largest contributor to the greenhouse gasses causing global warming-induced climate change, macro-plastics and micro-plastics in our oceans are said to be soon more numerous than fish – and it is all true. Yet to listen to the cheerful awardees and speakers and vendors at the “AD (Anaerobic Digestion) and Biogas Industry Awards” conference sponsored by ADBA (Anaerobic Digestion & Bioresources Association) and WBA (World Biogas Association) in Birmingham, England, which I attended a couple of weeks ago, you would be hard-pressed not to believe that humanity was joyfully in control of and basically done with the garbage problem – “consider it solved”!
And that is all true too.
In certain places.
I know it for a fact – I live and teach several of these paradigm-shifting solutions at home every day – and because of that fact, I was one of those cheerful, optimistic awardees, nominated for and ultimately receiving and taking home the “AD Hero of the Year” award for 2023.
Since I moved to Egypt in 2003 to work on my Ph.D. in the Environmental Analysis and Policy field, specializing in Urban Planning and Urban Ecology, I have devoted the last two decades to studying and helping solve the global garbage crisis.
The Awards Ceremony in Birmingham brought me and my team from our NGO “Solar C³ITIES” (“Connecting Community Catalysts Integrating Technologies for Industrial Ecology Solutions”) not just to receive accolades for our work in zero-waste education over the past decade and a half but to participate in a conference whose stakeholders are unabashedly enthusiastic about sensible and often simple technologies and the policies emerging around them which we are, as scientists and engineers, educators and businesses and policymakers, uncharacteristically confident can eliminate all of the problems associated with “production and consumption residuals” – valuable resources that people outside our industry erroneously consider “waste”.
Our Solar CITIES team members were recognized with 6 finalist nominations and 4 awards in three categories:
I gratefully received “AD Hero of the Year”. Our Solar C³ITIES co-founder and my former student Kathy Puffer received the “Women in Biogas” Award, and our other co-founder and Solar C³ITIES CEO Janice Kelsey was short-listed as a ”Women in Biogas” finalist.
Solar C³ITIES was short-listed for “Education Campaign of the Year,” while Kathy Puffer’s online “Biogas Education Hub,” which grew out of our applied STEM curriculum development work together in New York and Haiti, received “Highly Commended”. Janice was brought up on stage to accept the winning Education Campaign Award for our Solar C³ITIES colleague Boma Mohammed Chi who took his own training with Janice and Solar CITIES. He has since become a world-renowned trainer-of-trainers, founding the “Common Initiative Group / RRECAM Group”, teaching small-scale biogas in his native Cameroon.
The recognition our work received last month speaks to an old adage that has become a “lived truth” that we have “life-tested” every day since I first incorporated Solar C³ITIES in Cairo, Egypt, in 2006 while living and working with the Zabaleen trash-recycling community:
“One man’s trash is another’s treasure”.
We have been teaching our own applications of these ideas in our international Solar C³ITIES network for the last 17 years. For 15 of them, we have been building our own household and community-scale biodigesters, teaching others around the world how to build and operate their own, too, so as to eliminate 100% of so-called “organic waste” at the point of generation and rendering the rest of the “trash” amenable to efficient and cost-effective recycling – even ‘upcycling’ . We learned from the Zabaleen – and quickly realized when we applied their paradigm to our own homes and communities – that once you have removed or washed out the organic part of the ‘waste stream,’ (usually using it as a valuable input to a biodigester) what remains behind (clean plastic, cardboard, paper, metal, glass) is now easy to shred, grind, granulate, crush and store. Because it no longer contains any material that would otherwise rot and stink and attract vermin, we can (and do!) easily transform it into value.
My wife and I stopped “taking out the garbage” five years ago. We turn all of our organics into clean fuel and fertilizer, as we have for the past 15 years, but are now selling or building with everything left over. We will NEVER give away our “trash” to the municipality again!
Transformed into slurries and powders and granules and fuel and fertilizer through our community scale home biogas systems and food grinders and shredders and hammer mills and other pieces of simple technology, 100% of our “garbage” is now valuable. Even our #7 (“other” and supposedly “non-recyclable”) plastic is now super useful (combined by us and our students with our crushed-glass-sand to make beautiful sculptures for the Florida Wildlife Corridor Curriculum Project at Rosebud Continuum Eco-Science Center). We are an Education Hub in the “Precious Plastics Movement”.
Consider it solved; consider it done.
Likewise, the market-led and policy-driven ideas we are championing in our Solar CITIES PCGS think-tank/do-tank sustainability education approaches, ideas that were being lauded and celebrated at this international conference in England, are the result of people “seeing for themselves” what we know: that forward-thinking municipalities now have the know-how, the knowledge base, the lived experience and ALL of the technology necessary to end the scourge of wasted resources once and for all.
Educator-practitioners like me and our team and allies, who share our findings and experiences through open-source platforms like our “Solar C³ITIES Biogas Innoventors and Practitioners” Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/methanogens), where experiences and ideas and technologies are being shared daily by over 15,300 active members, and our blogs, like http://zabaleen.blogspot.com/, that teach everyone with an interest everything they need to know about “the gold in that there garbage” (ideas I learned when doing my doctorate living with the Zabaleen people and other trash recyclers) are filled with hope because in our little corners of the world, most waste no longer exists.
These are messages I have been sharing and teaching in my work at the Patel College of Global Sustainability here at USF for the last 7 years in my “Food-Energy-Water Nexus” and “Climate Mitigation and Adaptation” and “Envisioning Sustainability” and “Waste Not Want Not: Repurposing Refuse as Resource” classes which are all extensions and complements to the Systems Thinking and Food, Energy and Water and Policy concentration and core courses taught in our college.
In Systems Thinking, students learn that “transcending paradigms” usually has greater leverage than a mere change in the material or physical domains; we follow the work of Donella Meadows (Limits to Growth) and teach that the act of moving from “things-to-processes-to-goals-to-paradigms” is often less effective than starting with a broader vision of sustainability and applying systemic change through improved intent, a change in the way we THINK of things. To end the wasteful scourge of “garbage,” we have to remove the metaphorical trash can in people’s heads, not just put more recycle bins at the curbside.
Critics of programs that rely on “technical fixes” to big problems will, of course, speak of “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” – they rightly tell us it doesn’t matter how nice or efficient the chairs are or how many recycle bins you have on deck, or how comfortably positioned they are or how efficient the trash collection processes are if the entire ship is going down or if the garbage is being dumped overboard in the end. Nonetheless, when you find the right technologies and processes, such as we saw in action in England, you can’t help but leverage their existence into improved goals and paradigms. You can’t unsee the technical solutions once your mind is trained to see how they apply to the broader problems. At some point, we all start to see the world through the lens of the Zabaleen, whose lived experience as entrepreneurial recyclers over the past century has taught them, and through them taught me, that there is “no such thing as waste”, that “waste” should never be used as a noun, but should always be a verb or adjective: folks, we are “wasting resources”, we are “wasting time”, all of those production and consumption residuals are marvelous and precious materials, valuable assets and resources, being “WASTED”.
A conference like the one surrounding the AD Industry Awards Ceremony in England is one that brings together systems thinkers, professional and academic, who each are working in different domains, from the relational (transcending paradigms) to the material (changing techniques and creating more efficient technologies). By moving through “intent”, “design”, “natural capital,” and “processes,” the paradigm of the World Biogas Council (which emphasizes a “win-win-win-win-win” approach to materials management) shows its power for rapid true systemic change and explains the palpable sense of hope we all experienced in England and that made the awards, we can now leverage toward that change feel meaningful.
We got to interact with the Dutch company Mavitec (https://mavitecgreenenergy.com/)
with their mixed-municipal-waste solving “paddle mills”and micro-plastic elimination depacking equipment, and with Kinetic Biofuels (https://kineticbiofuel.com/) with their surface-area-enhancing straw briquette system that eliminates the burning of agricultural residues; we got to have long and inspiring talks with Thomas Runde of Germany’s Tietjen GmbH (https://www.tietjen-original.com/produkte/schnelllaeufermuehlen/) whose all-purpose hammer mills and waste-to-value-chain processing equipment is being applied to developing countries that are too often on the receiving end of “first world” garbage dumping, and Germany’s Biotec ( https://www.biotec.de/) whose slogan is “This is not a material problem, this is a behavioral problem”; we met with England’s Strategic and Technical Directors Ian Cain and Ian Sawle of Ekogea (https://www.ekogea.co.uk/ ), who created a company to make allies of bacteria and harness the magic of the microbiome to tackle climate change through a ‘Circular Farm Economy’; we chatted with the folks from Ulster (https://ulstershredders.com/) and learned about their dual access industrial shredders that end the need for scarce landfills in island economies, PRM Waste Systems (https://www.prmwastesystems.com/), proving their “enviable reputation for cost-effective solutions to industrial waste and recycling problems” and Atlantic Slurry Pumps (https://atlanticpumps.co.uk/), with a robust peristaltic design that enables the most caustic and abrasive materials to be moved to the right place in an industrial ecology. We talked with India’s Rotopump company (https://rotopumps.com/) with its superbly designed Progressive Cavity Pumps and their game-changing “durable single helix shaft in a replaceable double helix cavity” designs that reduce energy needs and O&M costs and move heavy sludges from where they are a burden to where they are a valued commodity. We learned from Spain’s Ferrobio (https://ferrobiogroup.com/en/home-2/) about their desulfurization and crop-enhancing iron hydroxide solutions, met with Brazil’s Mulheres Do Biogas (https://mulheresdobiogas.org)
, with their gender-empowering policy and education network, and visited hundreds of other solution providers. During those two days of presentations, workshops, and vendor meet-ups, we once again saw that everywhere out there is a vital piece of the paradigm-changing puzzle, simply waiting for us to connect the dots.
Of course, this is where our NGO, Solar C³ITIES (https://solarcities.solutions/) , has always operated and what my teaching at PCGS (https://www.usf.edu/pcgs/about/th-culhane.aspx ) has always focused on: connect those community catalysts, inspire others to see things through the circular economy and zero-waste lens, and apply hands-on training and life-tested experience to eliminating “waste” wherever we go.
It is our dedication to this mission that brought us to the world stage at the ADBA Awards last month. It is our continued focus on this very realistic goal that will drive our problem-solving work into the future, a future where we know there is only one place for humanity to put and keep its “garbage”: in the past!
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Photos for illustration can be found here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set?vanity=thculhane&set=a.10167764961185551
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