Suderbyne Ecovillage creates Europe’s first Solar CITIES Puxin Digestor
August 24, 2015
In April of 2015, T.H. Culhane of Solar CITIES travelled to Tamera Eco-village in Portugal. Culhane had personally bought and shipped Puxin molds there as a gift to the Global Ecovillage Network in honor of fallen comrade Paulo Mellett. Culhane had announced his intention to make the Puxin molds available to all GEN members at the GEN 19 conference at Zegg Ecovillage in Germany. He followed up on the promise at Paulo’s memorial service at Monkym Wyld Eco-village near Dorset England at the end of the summer of 2014.
At Tamera, Culhane led a workshop in biogas designs that included a dry build of the Puxin system. GEN Director Robert Hall from Suderbyne Ecovillage in Sweden was among the workshop participants being trained. He agreed that since his Ecovillage, on the island of Gotland, was already using commercial biogas for almost all of its gas needs, it would be the ideal place to showcase the technology. It is also a great place to work on the necessary “code compliance creep” wherein we use small scale demonstrations to eventually get policy to encourage this technology.
Paulo Mellett’s wife Ruth Andrade, working with Lush Cosmetics, secured funding from Lush to ship the Solar CITIES molds from Portugal to Sweden where Robert picked them up.
Robert Hall and Alisa Dendro and others from the ecovillage finished Europe’s first Puxin community-scale digester by August of 2015, placing it inside their super cool geodesic dome greenhouse where the fertilizer it produces can help create a year round cornucopia.
You can find out more at their website.
