Lessons Learned from San Jose, CA: Building Anaerobic Digestion Facilities for Municipal Organics

This episode corresponds to Lesson 5 and Lesson 7 (coming soon) of our online course. This week we speak with Jo Zientek, Deputy Director of the Environmental Services Department at the City of San Jose, California, about their new high solids anaerobic digestion/composting and biogas facility. We take a retrospective look at the city’s achievement in order to learn about their experiences, their challenges and successes in the development and operation of the facility. We discuss the permitting process, feedstock contract awards, the advantages of public/private partnerships, and the request for proposal process in order to highlight typical key success factors and pitfalls to expect with such a project. Thank you to Zero Waste Energy Development Company LLC, and Republic Services for making this episode possible. In December 2013, Zero Waste Energy Development Company LLC (ZWEDC) opened the first large-scale commercial dry fermentation anaerobic digestion facility in the United States. With the goal of taking organics recovery to the next level, ZWEDC desired not only to compost organics but also to extract its energy value. For more information, visit their website. Republic Services provides innovative Wet/Dry collection services to all businesses in the City of San José. The Wet/Dry system has nearly tripled the business recycling rate from 25 to over 70 percent since July 2012! All businesses receive wet collection service which includes organics collection such as food waste and food contaminated paper products. Dry waste includes recyclables and everything else. The materials are processed at the Newby Island Resource Recovery Park’s Recyclery. For more information, visit their website. In the show, we mention two upcoming events that are on our radar this week: Ecomondo - the 18th International Trade Fair of Material & Energy Recovery and Sustainable Development which takes place 5th and 8th of November. and The Venice 2014 5th International Symposium on Energy from Biomass and Waste, between the 17th and 20th of November.     Photo by the_tahoe_guy. Some rights reserved.