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.

If the process of waste digestion is merely a crude mimicking of animals’ digestion, and if the ingredients of waste digestion are discarded, partly-eaten food, animal carcasses, or animal & human excrement, and all of the chemicals and substances attached to any of them, then there remains an even more astounding truth: what comes out of a digester.

Just as with animals’ excretions of feces, urine, and of flatulence, waste digesters produce solids, liquids, and gases. The surprising truth is that the production of foul-smelling methane for sale entails dumping the digester’s resulting solids onto the ground, pouring its water into the environment, and often breaching its gases into the air by burning.

However odd and absurd it seems, the results of  composting discarded and masticated food, the rotting carcasses of rendered animals, and animal & human excrement are returned to the environment.  They are returned as solids, liquids, and gases, with added risk of the chemicals & diseases to which the digester’s original contents may have come into contact.

Sludge (‘BioWaste’ or “BioMass’).

A digester, like a stomach, does not digest food into neat canisters for ready transportation or storage.  The composting process doesn’t produce tiny cans of cooking fuel.  It produces, principally, a solid mixture of the dark and foul contents of the digester, itself: sludge.  Truck after truck dumps load after load into the digester, and those contents do not stay there forever.  Out they must come, in time, as cheeseburgers come out of people: as a mostly solid but wholly unpleasant substance.      

To make room for more, these solids have to be dumped somewhere, somehow.  They’re often spread on the ground.  Although that seems like an ordinary process of fertilization, it’s hardly so: this is not, and will never be, the compost from one’s garden.  Containment of disease causing agents, pathogens, is a constant concern of waste digestion.

So much so, that it’s a national focus of the USDA’s National Agricultural Biosecurity Center’s Consortium.  See, Carcass Disposal: A Comprehensive Review.  National Agricultural Biosecurity Center’s Consortium (August 2004).

From Chapter 7 on Anaerobic Digestion, Section 4.2, on Risk of Contamination:

If the end products of anaerobic digestion (biosolids) are applied to land without pathogens being sufficiently reduced, the pathogens may pose a risk of contamination. Human beings and animals can be contaminated after being exposed to variable quantities of pathogens, as shown in Table 7. The infective dose depends on the type of pathogen and health of the host. Indeed children, older people, and people with compromised immune system are at greatest risk.

(Emphasis added.)

Generally, sludge accumulates in the bottom of the digester. Consequently, all pathogen agents capable of surviving in the digester could still be found in the end product several months after the introduction of pathogens in contaminated carcasses.

Careful research has established how long these pathogens might survive in the environment. Again, from the Consortium report, page 14:

Days, months, years.  

One will not want to walk over those fields anytime soon.  

Liquids: ‘Water, water every where,  Nor any drop to drink’

Not merely solids, but liquids, too, will come from a digester. Proponents of these devices will look carefully for a way to dispose of the liquids from them.  Perhaps they’ll seek to burden an existing municipal water facility with the additional, vast flow of water from the digester.  They may likewise seek the entitlement to use an existing municipal permit from the state to allow final discharge into a nearby stream or creek.

This is especially troublesome  in those areas (like much of Wisconsin) with karst areas, areas with bedrock that is easily dissolved by water, after which there are numerous cracks, sinkholes, and ways for water to seep down into the ground, and into people’s wells.  Limestone is like this.

This is true for both liquids and solids in karst areas – they can contaminate the environment more easily than in areas with less porous bedrock.

Gases.

What, then, of the methane gases these digesters produce?   They are produced, but not alone: other gases come from a digester, too.  Even methane, while produced, isn’t always used – it’s sometimes burned off, when demand is low (as when competing natural gas is cheap) or when necessary despite demand.

Here, from Lusk, P. (1998). Methane Recovery from Animal Manures: A Current Opportunities Casebook. (3rd Edition. NREL/SR-25145. Golden, CO: National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Work performed by Resource Development Associates, Washington, DC., is a table from page 3-12 showing the gases a digester produces:

 Methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide.

There you are – not in some faraway place, but in your own city or town.

Tomorrow: The Economics of Waste Digesters.