In this introductory and general series of posts on waste digesters, I have listed all the organic waste that may be composted (digested) in an anaerobic waste digester. This organic waste may comprise discarded food, partly eaten-food, animal carcasses, or animal & human excrement.
All those ingredients can power an anaerobic digester, and often do, in those places that have them.
There are two reasons that, in this series, I have described the full organic ingredients list for digesters.
First, because this description is more complete, and so more accurate, than one that describes anaerobic digesters in more delicate ways, as though they could process only discarded garden vegetables.
Second, because although the proponents of a digester will often talk in delicate ways, the actual agreements that they execute with unsuspecting towns will specify a digester, but typically place no contractual limits on the contents that may go within it.
One may hear about one ingredient, but yet a community may unwittingly obligate itself contractually to accepting anything and everything that might go into the digester.
That’s the thin entering wedge: a delicate discussion, but later on, an unsavory contractual obligation.
(Of course, even if a community tried to impose a written limitation on the contents going into an anaerobic digester, verification of what was in each truckload, arriving as it would at any time of day or night, would be practically impossible.)
And yet, and yet, imagine a community so foolish that it would execute an agreement without even formally imposing those restrictions at the first instance.