Does Your Garbage Produce More Greenhouse Gas Than Your Car?

We hear a lot about the amounts of carbon dioxide produced by driving our cars and the operation of coal fired power plants and their role in climate change. What about the methane produced by our garbage and our ever-growing landfills? According to the EPA, Methane is about 21 times more powerful at trapping heat and warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Methane's chemical lifetime in the atmosphere is approximately 12 years. Methane’s relatively short atmospheric lifetime, coupled with its potency as a greenhouse gas, makes it a candidate in efforts to mitigate global warming within the next 25 years.

Sources of Methane

While a large portion of the methane is naturally produced, over half comes from direct human activity. The second largest man-made contributor is landfills. 16 million tons of compostable organic waste is added to California landfills every year. What if this methane producing waste could be converted to something useful? Could this be an opportunity to help the environment and produce economic benefits for our region?

Anaerobic Digestion

Enter anaerobic digestion and Clean World Partners. Anaerobic digestion is a process of controlled composting that captures the methane, hydrogen and carbon dioxide emissions from organic waste allowing it to be converted to biogas, a widely used renewable energy. An additional byproduct is a nutrient rich material that can be used as fertilizer for agriculture.

Clean World Partners is a Sacramento company “established to develop, design, build and manage turnkey anaerobic digestion systems that enable public and private organizations to divert organic waste from landfills and convert it into clean energy and safe, reusable by-products such as compost and clean water.”

Warren Smith a well-known Northern California entrepreneur, co-founder of the Sacramento River Cats baseball team and founder of Raley Field is the CEO of Clean World Partners.

The technology for the Anaerobic Digester is based on work by UC Davis professor Dr. Ruihong Zhang, Ph.D. an internationally recognized leader in organic waste conversion.

Although anaerobic digestion technology is proven to work in a research environment such as the 55,000 gallon demonstration project at UC Davis, there has yet to be construction of a successful commercial system in the U.S. Clean World Partners has proposed constructing a landmark 98 ton-per-day system on the grounds of Folsom Prison to demonstrate anaerobic digestion can be a commercially viable option to continued dumping of organic waste into landfills.

Greenwise Sacramento

Clean World Partners is just one of the organizations that are contributing to the growth of the green and clean technology industry in the Sacramento Region. We can now boast over 70 green tech companies. According to a report released by Palo Alto-based nonprofit Next 10, Sacramento led California in percentage of green job growth from 1995 to 2008, with an 87 percent jump from 7,019 to 13,102. The study showed Sacramento has more green jobs per capita than the Bay Area, Los Angeles or San Diego.

At the center of the effort to grow Sacramento’s green economy and to build the regions brand as a national leader on environmental technology is Mayor Kevin Johnson’s Greenwise Sacramento Initiative. The initiative has brought together a diverse group of individuals to participate on a task force with the goals of diversifying the economy, helping the environment and raising the green IQ and awareness of citizens in our region.

To learn more visit the Greenwise Sacramento website:

http://greenwisesacramento.org