Business View Magazine | March 2020

244 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MARCH 2020 wastewater plants have been employing a technology called anaerobic digestion. It’s the same thing that goes inside everyone’s gut; the bugs that live in our intestine that make gas are the same bugs that we have in our process. They come in the excrement and we give them a home where it’s warm and ideal for their existence; the more excrement we feed them, the more methane gas they make. We harness the gas that they make to heat the process and also to make electricity. It’s called a combined heat and power process.” “Prior to implementing this digester process that combines heat and power, with the digester that we had, all that gas was just wasted, it flared off,” Bryant adds. “With this process, we were able to capture it. A lot of treatment plants just flare off their methane.” Diorka continues, “We had a subsequent project that took away some of the food from the bugs and our process became upset – it didn’t have enough excrement. We thought about what we could do to supplement the excrement, and the obvious answer was food. So, we decided to partner with our schools to collect the waste food from their lunches; any food that the kids don’t eat, they separate out and we put that into our digester. But we still needed more. One day, at a conference, Allen and I were talking to someone from a neighboring community and they said that their wastewater plant was really having a hard time because there was a brewery in town that was discharging waste from the beer-making process and it was too much of a load for their wastewater plant, causing them to violate the Clean Water Act. They said that they had heard that we had a digester and that maybe we could help them out. “We entered into discussions with the brewery and did some studies with Michigan State University that showed that the beer waste would work well. We partnered with the brewery to bring their waste to us and we put it in the digester and that’s really helped out our system Holt Elementary students collect Food Waste