EDIT: You may want to read the first letter in the post below in order to remaind yourself about what's going on.
COMPOSTING AND ANAEROBIC DIGESTION
Thank you for your email of 3 June following my colleague’s reply regarding composting and anaerobic digestion. I have been asked to reply.
As my colleague stated, composting plays an important role in diverting biodegradable waste from landfill, therefore, reducing the amount of methane produced at these sites. During the process of commercial composting methane is still produced, however, this occurs in a more controlled environment than at landfill and can be used to recover energy from waste.
The Environment Agency and WRAP have created a Quality Protocol for the production and use of quality compost from source segregated biodegradable waste, this was published on15 March 2007. The Quality Protocol will help determine when compost can be considered as fully recovered and no longer waste for the purposes of the Waste Framework Directive (WFD) and should improve market confidence in the quality of compost, encouraging higher levels of demand for this material recycling. More details can be found at:
http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/subjects/waste/1019330/1334884/1713670/
Our newly published Waste Strategy for England 2007 emphasises the need to make waste prevention and reuse a central activity in all of our lives. It also stresses the need to maximise the amount of energy we recover from waste through processes such as anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion is the biological treatment of biodegradable organic waste in the absence of oxygen, utilising microbial activity to break down the waste in controlled conditions. This process produces biogas, which is rich in methane and can be used as a source of renewable energy and a digestate, which is nutrient rich and can potentially be used as a soil conditioner.
Further information on the work Defra is doing to establish even more sustainable waste management practices can be found at the following website address:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/waste/strategy/index.htm
Defra - Customer Contact Unit
4 comments:
So apparently we shouldn't compost foodwaste ourselves, but should get it done commercially to reduce wasteful gases, which is a bit odd considering DEFRA's support of home composting as noted in the previous letter.
So what about human waste compost?
I recall seeing a proggy a while back: some mad woman (or was she mad? not so sure) had all her dings drop into a bit sealed pit under her house, which was on stilts, sort of. Anyway, she used to compost her own poo and it made the veggies in her garden come up a treat. I wondered at the time whether she was adding 6x to the mix or it really was all her own.
Bet there was plenty of methane in that lot. If everyone did it, would it cause a problem?
Omally - that's a load of crap.
Haha.
Hahaha!
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