food scraps = energy in Malmo: the food grinder

it's 6.30pm and you just arrived home from work.  it's time to make dinner.  it is a simple meal.  pasta with veggies and sauce.  you pull out the cutting board and your favorite knife.  you scrub all of the terrible pesticides and toxins off your vegetables, hoping that this shiny red pepper is not the one that puts one nano gram too much of whatever you don't want in your body.  you chop and cut and chop and suddenly you are sauteing it all in a pan.  the water is boiling for the pasta and voila! you have dinner.  it's delicious, by the way.

cleanup in this kitchen is almost as easy as making the mess.  you finished the pasta sauce so you splash some water around in the jar and dump it down the drain.  you open the door under the sink and deposit the jar into the clear glass recycling bin.  the scraps of vegetables go into the food grinder (what we used to call the garbage disposal).  you splash a little water on the plates and silverware and put it all in the dishwasher.  you always win the clean plate award so there are no scraps on the plate, but if there were any scraps or anything else that could be ground in the food grinder, you'd dump them into the sink and wash them "away" as well.

kitchen sink in the apartment.  pretty "normal" looking.  the silver button on the upper left turns on the food grinder.

then the magic starts.  you turn on the water and press the little silver button.  a loud gurgling sound emits from inside the sink drain, gradually getting more uniform and higher pitched.  when the last of the food remnants are gone, you press the silver button again and it's done.  your "wasted" food is on it's way to becoming energy.

it's a titan.  food grinder.

a separate piping system takes the water and ground food waste to a nearby storage tank.  it's surprisingly simple.  sedimentation allows the liquid to skim off the top inside the tank and join the rest of the waste water on it's way to a treatment plant in the harbor.  what settles at the bottom of the tank is pumped away to a nearby plant where they tank it all back together in a specific method that turns this "waste" into something called biogas.

pipes from both sink drains joining to go separately out of the building to a sediment and storage tank where the food waste separates and is pumped offsite for transformation from food waste to biogas

biogas, as you can imagine, is just like other gases that you know.  it can be burned like natural gas to heat your home boiler or hot water.  it can be refined into fuel to power your car.  it is basically like oil except we didn't have to dig for it or destroy anything like forests or water supplies or the environment to get it.  it is a natural byproduct of human consumption.  oh, and in case you are wondering (which I am sure you are) it is:

• "clean" (meaning that the stuff that goes into the food grinder is food, not plastic or other undesirable items that dilute or destroy the biogas process)
• hygienic for the inhabitant (what you put into the grinder is what you have already touched)
• natural (no cleaning products, chemicals, or other stuff needs to be added)
• simple (press a button and it's done)
• cleaner burning (biogas is much lower emission and cleaner burning than many other fuels, especially oil based fuels such as gasoline and diesel)

if you are looking for an alternative to oil to power cars, buses, and other transportation, biogas could be a very successful option.  we've all seen how much food goes down the drain (which is, in itself, an area that needs some improvement).  the city of Malmo is making great strides to use food waste to produce energy and hopes to have the entire city bus fleet on biogas within ten years.  there is also a campaign to collect compost style food waste in all neighborhoods of the city as well as using the new grinder method.

want more info?
a company called vasyd is a main stakeholder in this process.  their (vasyd) website is also very informative (and has english translations).  I met with Mimmi Bissmont from the vasyd Malmo office.  she was extremely helpful and supportive.  thanks Mimmi!  her work focuses on connecting action, behavior, and sustainable efforts.  for more info on improved use of energy through behavior, check out this post on the psychology of energy reduction or this post about energy reduction through feedback loops.

the rest of it (restavfall)

I asked tamara about recycling in the building and she explained that the system for recycling here is like any other.  you collect cans and bottles and bring them down once a week (or so) to a recycling/ trash room.  someone comes along and empties that room once a week (or so).  the same key (assa abloy by the way) that gets you in the front door of her building and her apartment also gives access to the recycling room.

recycling room for my building complex (around the entire courtyard).

smartly put a locking system on the glass collection.  no unnecessary cuts or accidents here.

I can't say it smelled very pleasant inside, but most trash rooms are not exactly appealing places to hang out and enjoy a cocktail or a nice meal.

cardboard recycling

paper recycling

the room has motion sensor lights, as pretty much everything does in the entire apartment complex.  it has cement board walls and ceilings, plastic recycling and trash bins, and signs on the walls corresponding to each bin.  again, very simple and very functional.

clear glass recycling

colored glass recycling

they separate the recycling here in the room, which is something it seems most american cities are going away from (maybe this is not the case for apartment buildings, but it definitely seems as though individual point collection at houses is becoming more of a "throw everything into one bin" approach as opposed to having it all presorted as it was in the 1990's and early 2000's).

plastic recycling (except plastic bags)

lighting recycling/ disposal

tamara says that its a pretty easy system for her except for the fact that she needs several different containers in the house.  in fact, I count that she has six (6) separate containers, which seems a little much from my perspective, especially when living in a small apartment.

  

battery recycling

electronics recycling

(1) she has a tiny (I repeat... TINY) trash bin under the sink that is about the size of a toaster.  it seems to always have almost nothing in it.  (2) behind that she has a metal bin, equally as small (I have been putting beer cans and mackerel in tomato tins into this bin quite frequently).  she has a larger cardboard bin (3) and a larger plastics bin (4) in the kitchen on the floor.  she has a batteries/ glass bin (5) under the sink.  then outside of her apartment door she has a mini metal trashcan that has more bottles (6).  wow.

metal recycling

yes, the word they use for trash in Swedish is RESTAVFALL and as you would guess, it basically means "the rest of it".  actual translation seems to be "residual waste", which is an extremely accurate description of what goes into that one bin.  go figure, they first dispose of everything else to be reused, turned into energy, or recycled.  then they have a bin for the rest of it. 

residual waste... the rest of it