All those food scraps from tonight’s dinner can now go towards cooking tomorrow’s meal, thanks to a new concept called HomeBiogas. The system works well enough to produce enough cooking gas for up to three meals a day, while also producing clean and natural liquid fertilizer for use in the garden.
This environmentalist’s dream will be available soon thanks to a successful Indiegogo campaign that reached its $100,000 funding goal in less than 24 hours. The Israeli-based startup HomeBiogas expects the system to ship in May 2016.
HomeBiogas looks like a greenhouse and includes several components to process food waste: A digester tank, powered by a solar cover that captures heat from the sun, processes the waste and separates the gas from the decomposing waste. Filters and chlorinators process the gas and sludge produced. A spigot on the other side of the digester tank allows the user to obtain liquid fertilizer once the process is complete.
Up to six quarts of food waste can be processed per day, producing up to three hours of cooking gas, HomeBiogas says. The system is designed to work in climates where the average daily temperature is around 64; the system is not designed to operate in cold or freezing temperatures.
Those who pledge to support the Indiegogo campaign can get the system as low as $945. The final retail price is expected to be $1500.
Why this matters: Clean energy is a hot market, but some types—including liquefied petroleum gas—don’t come from renewable sources. If the HomeBiogas works as advertised, it will produce energy that’s both clean and renewable, with the side benefit of reducing the amount of waste that ends up in our landfills.
It’s not just about you
As with most environmentally friendly energy solutions, HomeBiogas is positioning its product as a way to eliminate your contribution to the stressors our daily lives put on our surrounding environment.
Producing your own gas through our own waste eliminates the need for use of energy sources that may produce that energy in much less environmentally friendly ways. The fertilizer it produces can be used in the garden to lessen the need to travel to market to purchase it, which adds pollution through car exhaust, and the truck exhaust it took to get there in the first place.
That’s the whole concept of the self-sustainability movement in a nutshell—not only limiting your own impact, but limiting the additional impacts on the environment created by your needs.