Comment 59877

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted February 16, 2011 at 15:43:22

We need holistic solutions. There's no use solving our energy problems at the expense of our food supplies, or vice versa.

Lightly managed, small-scale organic waste digestion has come a long way. Experimental bio-reactors, even those built with plastic buckets for youtube videos, are now able to give off methane gas, electric power, heat, fertilizer and clean water, with inputs of dirty water and organic waste. The systems can be tweaked to produce one or another in particular, but so far studies have shown they tend to operate most effectively when doing several.

Such a system would be hard to run on a municipal scale, but not on a household or neighbourhood scale. It could replace nearly every important municipal service - water, power and waste management, along with providing a constant source of high-quality fertilizer and soil. By utilizing this fertilizer to grow more locally (even if it's just being cycled back in as yard waste), we could then replace much of the mass-produced goods we rely on (food, fibers etc). It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd beat the hell out of eating bark, mud, or each other.

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

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