Curio #260 | Digester eggs A daily curious fact from Justin Kitch, Curious CEO Starting next year, restaurants in New York City will be required to separate food scraps from their trash. It will go to waste treatment plants like the new one in Brooklyn called Newtown Creek. There it will be processed in gigantic egg-shaped steel tanks, called digester eggs. They are stunningly beautiful (click below for a photo), not to mention amazing in their simplicity. They collect millions of tons of waste after it has been turned into a pea soup sludge, where billions of bacteria slowly eat it. In the process--called anaerobic digestion because it doesnt require oxygen--methane gas is produced, which is fed into the citys natural gas lines. Newtown Creeks eight eggs generate enough gas to heat 2500 homes, but dont come close to processing the 1.3 billion gallons of waste water and tons of compost produced every day in New York City. Hey, if all it takes to solve our energy problems is for everybody to eat organic, poop regularly, and tolerate hundreds of cool-looking giant steel eggs spotting the skyline, count me in!
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 23:09:46 +0000
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