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by Richard Maltzman,
Dave Shirley
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Dave Shirley
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Date
Imagine three hamburgers on a plate. Or, it could be three uitsmijters, three tortas, three bowls of laping, three plates of mansaf, Whatever cuisine you prefer, imagine 3 servings of it sitting in front of you.
Now - throw one in the garbage. Use your imagination, of course.
Unfortunately, this is not imaginary. In the US, we waste – “throw away” – about a third of our food.
In fact, most of the 130 billion pounds of food that Americans wasted in 2015 sits in landfills, giving off methane, directly to the atmosphere.
There is well, not a solution, because the solution would be eliminating the food waste, but a partial solution – turning that food waste into electricity. It’s done with an anaerobic digester. The US Department of Energy does a good job describing what that is, at this link.
In simple terms, it is a gigantic stomach. It uses 'friendly' bacteria to emulate the digestion process and to convert organic waste into inorganic gasses like methane and carbon dioxide. It's the methane we want, because it can be used to produce electricity.
If all of this talk of food waste and manure has you hungry for more (learning), there’s also an excellent video from Washington State University, here.
This is being done on a large scale, in particular at a facility in northern Colorado.
Here is the Heartland Gas story from their website:
Using a mixture of cow manure from local dairies and organic waste from restaurant grease traps, spoiled grocery store products, cafeteria waste and food processing residuals, the facility will produce over 50 megawatts of renewable natural gas. Additional products include compost and liquid fertilizer which will be used by local farms. After the biogas is cleaned and compressed, it will be injected into the Colorado Interstate Gas Company pipeline.
A recent report from the nonprofit group ReFED found that digesters not only generate renewable energy, they also divert food waste from landfills, cut down on harmful emissions and provide a few jobs along the way.
So, you may be thinking, as you have your second uitsmijter* - what’s the project management connection here?
We can think of three right away:
- This is a Green-By-Definition project, as described in our book, Green Project Management
- This is an example of taking a negative risk (a threat, in the form of food waste) and turning it into a positive risk (an opportunity).The AD plant creates electricity, jobs, and prevents food waste from going into landfills and generating methane (a very bad greenhouse gas) directly into the atmosphere.
- Project management is about efficiency and reduction of waste.It doesn’t always have to be about cash.In this case, its’ more about trash…which turns into cash.
Of course, ideally we want to do what we can to reduce the waste in the first place, and you can go here to learn about what the USDA is recommending about this.
Note: We got inspired to write this post after eating two-thirds of a bagel and… no – really, our inspiration came from this article by Luke Runyon at NPR. Thanks to him, we are literally watching what we eat!
*an uitsmijter (description courtesy of holland.com) is an open-faced sandwich with ham, cheese and fried eggs. The sandwich is eaten with knife and fork and is considered a full meal. Most often the choice of meat will be ham, if not specified, but uitsmijters can also be served with roast beef, pastrami, turkey, bacon or even just with cheese.
The eggs are usually served sunny-side up, over-medium. If you order an uitsmijter (the word means “bouncer” or “out-thrower”, if you translate it literally: the dish was often the last thing served at parties or in bars before closing time) for breakfast it's served by itself. As a lunch item, it usually comes accompanied with a small salad on the side or some greens to spruce it up.
As you may be able to tell, there is a certain irony in our choice of this food: it's about throwing out food!
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: April 08, 2016 10:02 PM |
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