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.

Welcome.

If you’re visting in search of information on commercial waste digesters – of their environmental, economic, municipal-fiscal, and public policy implications — please see my introductory series here @ FREE WHITEWATER. I’ve a dedicated category on them generally, and another category about a proposal to construct one in Whitewater, Wisconsin.

Thanks for visiting – and feel free to look around at all my sites: Daily Adams, Daily Wisconsin, and FREE WHITEWATER.

There’s more than one reason to be concerned about large commercial waste digesters: their environmental risks, their fiscal strain on a municipality’s infrastructure, their exaggerated or illusory economic benefits, and the secretive way they’re promoted by a few insiders.

For these reasons, I’ve a modest proposal: let those within a community who introduce these waste-processing plants live closest to them, and daily walk through the fields spread with their waste, drink the water that comes from them, and breathe deeply of the malodorous gases from them.

Better still, if proponents are so very confident of this waste-disposal scheme, let them have their children play in those fields, drink only the digester’s water, and inhale the gases from the digester plant. Not merely for a day, but instead day after day and year after year, as a regular and unfailing routine.

If the processing of rotten food, partly-eaten food, animal carcasses, and excrement (and all attached to them) offers only benefits and no risks, then proponents should be happy to relocate near a large, commercial digester. Why should other homeowners, their families, schools, retirement communities, parks, a campus, and nearby farms and businesses be alone in proximity to the digester?

A ‘monumental’ deal surely deserves monumental confidence and commitment: let each advocate take pride of place, and move near the digester.

It’s a simple request, and fulfillment just a real estate agent’s call away, after all.

Why live far away, when one could have the honor of being next door?

If what goes into a digester is foul (and it is), and if what comes out of one is foul (and it is), then what accounts for proposals on their behalf?  It is not, and never has been, a consequence of popular desire.  There’s a clue in this, worth considering.

Demand.

One knows, after all, that demand is an “economic principle that describes a consumer’s desire and willingness to pay a price for a specific good or service.”  So, where are these many consumers who ask, from among all alternatives, that rotting food and animals be trucked into their communities day and night, from faraway places, composted in a vast, foul-smelling building, and then returned to the neighborhood as solids, liquids, and gases?

There are no groups of consumers like that.  None.

If given a dozen ways to manage and handle the decaying and the excreted, no sensible person would choose a process that brought it closer to him.  This is altogether sensible: the best practice is to transport waste away from cities and towns, away from the ground on which one walks, water that one drinks, and the air that one breathes.

There is no consumer demand for huge waste digesters as a garbage-disposal scheme.  There are no crowds clamoring for these devices. Nowhere or anywhere, so to speak.  The self-interested few may hawk them; the impartial many have never gathered in their favor.

Subsidies.

A good, private idea will always attract private capital – from banks and investors. America’s economy produces well over over a dozen trillion dollars annually – there is plenty of business capital for large ventures.

One should be wary of big talk, about big deals, but deals that can’t find private investment.  Consumers may have hardships, but real capitalists use private capital.

A waste digester deal, while foolishly described as ‘monumental,’ typically involves large sums of public money, from state and federal taxpayers’ dollars, for the means to build a waste and garbage processing operation in a town. Those pushing these deals will rely on municipal grants (taxpayer money), community development grants (taxpayer money), municipal or community development loans (taxpayer money), and federal bonds (public debt) to build their plants.

They’ll also seek to use as much as they can of existing municipal facilites, for treatment and disposal, thus burdening the public’s municipal infrastructure.

So much for private investment: out-of-town businessmen make a private profit processing waste into a town’s environment using that very town’s public resources.

That’s not a private investment; it’s a public mistake.

Employment.

Waste digester proponents talk about the jobs that they will provide, and advocates will promise some jobs here, or some there.  An actual enumeration of these jobs is typically missing from their claims. These jobs could only be one of three kinds: those who build the digesters, those who truck refuse and excrement to the digesters, and those who work in the digester plants.

Here one sees that claims of employment are temporary, inflated, or illusory. Those who build the plants will not remain, but will instead move on to other jobs in other places. They are no permanent addition to the labor pool. They are only briefly to be counted.

Those who truck refuse into and from a city each day aren’t new, local workers. They are transitory garbage haulers. Dozens of jobs in a local factory aren’t the same as dozens of garbage haulers, with loads from distant cities, simply driving in and out of a town at all hours. They are over-counted.

But what of those who will work, permanently, at the digester plant? There is the most telling question of all, as these plants may be operated and monitored remotely from an out-of-town headquarters, safely away from the refuse and odors of the host city.

So, for each and every one of these proposals, one should ask: Will this facility be run remotely? If you say it will not be so, can you enumerate the time and roles of each and every fulltime, permanent local job the facility produces?

One may wait a long time for an answer, but even longer for a candid one.

The Successful and Sensible Reject Waste Digesters.

Consider where one finds waste digesters, and one will see the truth about them.  It’s only among vulnerable,  foolish, and  downmarket communities that one finds a large waste digester.

There is no example in all America of a successful and thriving  community, a clean and pleasant place, that has welcomed a large, commercial digester.  Not one. 

The homeowners, parents, merchants, consumers, and residents of enjoyable towns – across this vast country of over three-hundred million – have never wished this for their communities.

A waste digester is not what uplifts a place, but what befalls it.

It’s that simple.

Tomorrow: A Modest Proposal.