Putrescible Waste 2 (by sarah)
Having looked into this a bit more I discover that a lady up the hill from us did indeed used to feed resturant waste to her wormeries but that she had to give the business up.
Why?
Becuase she could not sell the compost.
Why?
Becuase we import stuff cheaper than she could produce it for. Why are we importing compost? And she said it was from the Netherlands I think (well around there somewhere) - this concerns me as I bet it is peat we are actually importing and the peat bogs are a bit of an endangered habitate plus it is the cold climate carbon sink (like the rain forestests only for cold climate - peat is made from moss you see and it takes ages for it to all stake up like that and make peat.)
This is even worse when you think about the fact that we will be using lots of fuel to ship the stuff over - now I like international trade but things like this annoy me - there is no reason to import this stuff 🙁
Someone pointed out we have land which we could use for this perpose - for a start the land is not currently ours it belongs to Al's family but not directly us. Plus having spoken to this lady I think that we'd have trouble doing more than 30 resturants.
Still it is now on my todo list for when we have a) free time and b) money.
I am actually wondering about the practicalities of producing alcohol for non-culinary uses from such waste plus what of the volitile gases like methan etc... Maybe with the help of a chem eng student or three we could design some big ol' bacteria compost muching vats with pipes and what not to syphon stuff of?
This is obviously a new idea so it is not well thought out and there's bound to be fifty million problems but still its worth thinking about surely?
p.s. people feel free to still this idea and run with it though let people know about it and dont get your pantent locked in a safe so no one can do anything please?
Tue 20th Mar 2007 9:29 pm 
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