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0 pointshannob4y ago0 comments

Ideally your kitchen waste would go into a facility that properly handles it and will use it for energy production, but in a properly controlled environment (and if that energy production is biogas by avoiding methane leakage as good as possible).

Of course whether that happens depends a lot on where you're living.

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toomanybeersies4y ago

Although our municipal green waste gets converted to compost, I recently found out that there is a food waste to energy plant in my city [1]. Going by their numbers, a home can be powered for a year with 25 tonnes of food waste, or 70 kg a day.

The two largest sewerage treatment plants also capture and generate electricity from biogas [2].

[1] https://www.yvw.com.au/faults-works/planned-works/completed-...

[2] https://www.melbournewater.com.au/water-data-and-education/e...

hannobOP4y ago

I think in Germany this is pretty standard (both turning organic waste into biogas and collecting biogas at sewage treatment facilities).

And tbh not treating organic waste as some form of resource should be considered a scandal these days, and the only valid discussion to be had should be how to use it (my bet would be that in the long term that will be chemicals and not energy). There is legitimately a lot of talk about the landuse issues of bioenergy, but using organic waste doesn't have any of those problems. It should be an absolute nobrainer.

dredmorbius4y ago

That ideal is far from happening.

Household waste either goes to commercial composting plants (where the methane produced most likely escapes) or to sanitary landfills, where the reduced biological activity means that the scraps degrade at a much slower rate, but do eventually reduce to methane and other lipids, though possibly at the scale of millennia or longer.

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