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New York Is Turning Its Leftovers Into Natural Gas, With the Help of Hungry Bacteria

Some cities are taking table scraps and turning them into fuel.

Compost (Jaydot)

In Brooklyn, huge tanks filled with bacteria wait for the first food scraps to start arriving. These "digester eggs" are here to solve an eternal conundrum: what to do with the scraps of food left behind during cooking or rejected on the plate? When food waste goes to landfills, it takes up space and produces climate-disrupting greenhouse gas. But New York City is adopting a new idea: make gas out of food waste on purpose, and use it to fuel the city.

From NPR




In 2015, New York City restaurants will be required to separate their organic waste from the rest of the refuse. Some have already started as a part of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Food Waste Challenge initiative, and, in the first six months of the program, participating restaurants diverted 2,500 tons of waste from landfills. They turned that waste into compost or delivered it to facilities like the one in Brooklyn, to be turned into biogas, and from there into electricity.

But there's a difference between recycling at a business and recycling at home. The city is working to expand the food waste recycling programs to encompass residential food waste as well, collecting food scraps in the same way that bottles, cans and other recyclables are collected now. 

From the NYT

Residents of apartment buildings dump pails of food scraps at central collection points, most likely in the same places they put recyclable material.



Even if New Yorkers take to the new recycling program with enthusiasm (and at least some will, as seen in the popularity of the Greenmarket composting program), there’s the problem of where all that rotting food will go. The plant in Brooklyn isn’t built to handle every single last scrap of potato peel that New York City's kitchens turn out.


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