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2014

Mexico’s First Urban Biogas System

“Bode-gas”: Mexico’s first Urban Biogas systems are installed at the office of the Fundacion Haciendas del Mundo Maya in Merida

January 2, 2015

By nightfall on Monday, December 29th, 2014, just as the downpour of rain started, we miraculously finished building the Yucatan’s first urban biogas digester. For this digester, we used our Solar CITIES modification to the ARTI design. On the 31st, we modified another Rotoplas tank as a closed digester to take more urban food waste and increase capacity. We made the second tank without cutting or penetrating the water tank itself. Instead, we did all of the work through the screw lid, which was sealed with silicone and bolts and wingnuts.  This novel idea will enable members of the Maya community who already use such tanks to irrigate their horticultural plantings to get both gas and liquid fertilizer from the same tank with only marginal extra cost (a couple of tubes, uniseals, nuts and bolts and valves).

We named this sort of urban biogas system in Latin America “Bode-gas” after “Bodega”, which is a small grocery store in an Urban Area, usually in a hispanic neighborhood.  Bodegas exist all over Latin America.  These urban biogas systems takes what the grocery store produces and turns it into fuel for cooking the grocery store products and fertilizing a new generation of groceries, preferably grown hydroponically and aeroponically on the roof or in the back yard of a bodega, thereby completing the cycle!

This was a truly happy way to ring out the old and ring in the new. Happy New Year!

 

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Swaziland Farm IBC/ARTI Hybrid Biogas System

The Solar CITIES Swaziland team finishing up the biodigester for grandpa Simon’s farm.

August 26, 2014

Simon, the grandfather of Sakhiwe Songhe who helped us build the digester at Sundowner’s Backpackers Lodge, lives on a farm in Swaziland outside Manzini where he has fruit orchards and keeps cattle, geese, and chickens.  It is here that Sakhiwe and Bonkhe are conducting this year’s follow up to their hydroponics experiments. They are proving to farming communities that you can achieve at least twice the yield on Swaziland’s poor land using compost to build soil.  Solar CITIES went to the farm the weekend of August 23 and 24. With the family and international volunteers, we built a Solar CITIES IBC/ARTI hybrid biogas system to provide cooking gas for Simon and fertilizer for Sakhiwe and Bonkhe’s science-in-action experiments as they go into their senior year of high school.

Sundowner’s Backpacker Lodge Digesters

The Solar CITIES Swaziland team, co-led by Sergio Almeida

August 24, 2014

Dr. T.H. Culhane, Rohit Fenn, and Amit Fenn traveled to Swaziland to work with Science in Action winners Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Mahlalela. Rohit is a young man from India who designed a more efficient toilet and Amit is an evolutionary biologist and Rohit’s older brother. Sakhiwe and Bonkhe were interested in working with the Solar CITIES team to add the ‘food waste to fuel and fertilizer’ biogas  solution to their toolkit for improved low-cost hydroponics in Swaziland

We stayed at the Sundowners Lodge near Manzini. At the lodge, Peace Corps and other project teams spend their evenings. There is also a crossflow of Swazi and international visitors who share ideas for making the world a better place. During the week, everyone learned how to build a biodigester and saw how they can provide energy security and also help provide food security too!

The Solar CITIES team built a Solar CITIES IBC/ARTI hybrid system for the lodge. Immediately after, they built another one and transported it to the farm of Sakhiwe’s grandfather, Simon. Simon is on the right in blue in the picture.

Now Swaziland has two operating biodigesters that provide fuel cooking food and fertilizer for growing crops. 

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Mini Digester at Principia College

Culhane teaches participants to build a mini biodigester

August 17, 2014

During the sustainability conference at Principia College we built a functioning mini digester out of paint buckets.  It really works and not only teaches the principles but gives a few minutes of daily gas!

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/2014/0516/Thomas-H.-Culhane-teaches-people-to-build-fuel-sources-powered-by-garbage 

The participants in the workshop built the digester by watching the following videos. If they can do it, so can you!

The first video is an animation done in Blender 3D:

And here Culhane’s students at Mercy College, NY show the system they built.

Rotoplas and the Micro-Scale Technology Trend

Dr. Culhane and Yuliana Banda Zavala demonstrate the workings of the Solar CITIES modified ARTI

August 16, 2014

On a trip to Mexico, Rotoplas engineers surprised Culhane with a Solar CITIES-style modified ARTI digester. They had built the digester in anticipation of his visit. The digester included “microbial motels” to increase surface area. Rotoplas is exploring its own line of rotomolded home biogas systems. The company is already the top producer of home-scale “biodigestores” in central and south America for treating toilet wastes, though these systems capture no gas.  For Rotoplas to enter into the small scale biogas market would be a real boon for development!

In 1973, Rotoplas began its operations with spinning-molding technology. It has evolved into one of the most successful and respected rotomolding companies in the world. In 1984, Rotoplas pioneered the replacement of asbestos water tanks with polyethylene and polypropylene materials. As a result, Rotoplas became the industry leader in water capture, storage, and delivery improvements with a current distribution on over 2.5 million “Better Water Systems”.  Rotoplas has some 25 fabrication plants including two in Leon, one in Monterey, one in Guadalajara, one in Mexico City, one in Tucsla, and one in Merida. Others span Latin America, from Guatemala to Peru to Argentina and Brazil.  This kind of production and distribution network radically lowers transportation and transaction costs and makes it possible for Rotoplas to meet the development needs of a huge and diverse population of clients, consumers, and agencies.

With an annual investment of 1.5% of sales on research and development activities and continuous innovation and improvement and expansion of their product line, Rotoplas is always able to stay ahead of the curve as sociopolitical, financial, and ecological situations change.  With its Bano Digno program now providing hundreds of thousands of home-scale biodigester solutions for black water treatment, the stage has been set for Rotoplas to lead the 21st trend toward micro-scale technology.

SolarCITIES, Rotoplas, and other biogas innovators have established that biodigestion can be safely and effectively used to treat household fecal wastes for safe discharge. Biodigestion can also transform all organic residuals (except for lignocellosic materials like branches and other wooden structures) into nitrogen rich liquid fertilizer. In addition, biodigesters capture the photosynthetic energy in food scraps and garden wastes and transform it into methane that can be used in natural gas-powered stoves, generators, refrigerators and process heat equipment. Rotoplas stands to become a world leader in market-based solutions to the food waste problem, and will help to:

  • Keep rotting material out of landfill, qualifying for Greenhouse Gas Reduction funds
  • Reduce garbage hauling and transport costs
  • Reduce or eliminate pests and disease
  • Eliminate the deforestation and indoor air pollution that results from biomass cooking and heating

All of this can be done while providing low-cost reliable energy in the form of clean biomethane. Rotoplas is set to emerge as a total environmental services solution provider.

Garden Biogas System

Solar CITIES intern-turned-student-leader Jorma Gorns becomes a first flamer outside his high school

August 7, 2014

A couple of years ago a young man named Jorma Gorns from the Gymnasium Altenholz in Kiel, northern Germany, wrote Solar CITIES a letter asking if it would be possible to intern with us on some project around the world.  A year later he took the train down and came to stay with us in Essen and helped Culhane redesign the ARTI gas holder on the porch.  A year after that he raised funds from his school and came to work with Culhane at Mercy College in New York for a week and then in Niteroi and Rio in Brazil for a week, gaining expertise in IBC and Puxin designs.  Once back in Germany he and his schoolmate built their own Solar CITIES IBC system in the garden of the high school, feeding it with chicken manure to get it started. When Culhane visited in July of 2014, they started a regime of feeding it flower petals from the garden. This is our first flower-fed garden biogas system and it seems to be working well!