Janice Kelsey: Hi, I'm Janice. Jody Spangler: And I'm Jody.
"Raising baby dragons to save the world."
JK: Saving the world seems like a pretty big task,
for ordinary people like you and me.
JS: Not for a dragon.
JK: Just for this time together,
we want you to imagine a world where dragons live,
where all children play on green grass,
where women have access to clean cooking fuel,
right in their own homes,
where families can light and heat their homes
at absolutely no cost.
JS: Imagine, all this is true!
JK: Allow us to introduce you to how together we can make this happen.
We're moms, we're educators
and recently, we and several other women have been dubbed "the women of biogas".
(Laughter)
We have become part of a growing global community on Facebook,
called "Solar CITIES Biogas Innoventors & Practitioners",
founded by dr. Thomas H Culhane.
Over 6,000 members are learning and sharing
a technology that we believe is an overlooked technology,
called small-scale biogas, or home-scale biogas.
This ancient technology is well-known in countries like India and China.
JS: Still, many people have never even heard of it.
JK: We're going to introduce you to your own baby dragon today;
but before we do,
you'll need to understand the meaning of two words,
biodigestion and biogas.
Most people are familiar with composting.
In composting,
we pile up our leaves and our grass clippings and garden waste
into one big pile.
Then we turn it from time to time, to mix air into the pile.
It heats up and it breaks down
because of something called aerobic bacteria.
That's bacteria that likes air.
After a few months,
we have well-aged compost that we can put on our garden.
In biodigestion we take our manure, our food waste and our garden waste
and we put it into a closed container.
The bacteria inside of this container digest the material,
then we fill up the tank with water
to remove all the air, because this bacteria does not like air.
This bacteria breaks up the contents of the container within 24 hours.
In a day, rather than months.
The bacteria inside of you, me and any animal is anaerobic,
which leads us to the word biogas.
The meaning of the word biogas is much easier to understand.
The dictionary says that biogas is a gaseous fuel, especially methane,
produced by the fermentation of organic matter.
In the relatively new field of permaculture,
the biogas is considered
one of the "appropriate technologies" in permaculture design.
Now, to bring biogas down to a very basic level,
I'm going to illustrate by using a word
that you don't typically hear in such a prestigious venue as this.
Are you ready?
Fart.
(Laughter)
You knew it was coming.
How many of you men, maybe even some of you ladies,
lit or knew someone who lit a fart on fire
because they didn't believe it would really work?
And it did!
Well, that is an example of biogas on a very small scale.
Your body is a small-scale biodigester.
You eat food;
the bacteria in your gut digest that food;
it creates gas; and you pass biogas.
Pretty simple, right?
Well, our baby dragon is much more delicate.
This is the biogas stove in my kitchen.
My baby dragon helps me to cook my breakfast on biogas,
every morning, with a clean blue flame.
Can you believe that you can cook meals on poop and food waste?
(Laughter)
Well we're going to show you how, beginning with conception.
Jodi's going to help us put together the basic body parts.
What we have here is an intermediate bulk container.
Now, these containers are used to ship liquids all around the world.
But once they're done with that, they become industrial trash.
So we can recycle this trash
and turn it into a source of sustainable energy.
We first cut a hole in one corner,
and then we cut a hole in the opposite corner.
Now what Jodi's holding up are called uniseals.
They're basically rubber gaskets that create a tight seal with no leaks.
We would normally glue these in, but we're not going to do that today.
Your baby dragon is going to need three basic sections:
she is going to need a mouth and a throat;
she's going to need an outlet that we'll talk more about later;
and then she is also going to spit fire when she's old enough.
She's going to spit biogas,
so she's going to need an outlet for that too.
The gas outlet is basically
a combination of pipes and plumbing fixtures
that get glued together
and then fastened to the lid of the container.
Let's take a look inside.
Your little embryo of a dragon
has a thin layer of stone in the bottom of its belly
to create more surface area for the bacteria to live on.
Next, your baby dragon
is going to need some good healthy gut bacteria
so we're going to add a nice thick layer of fresh manure.
You can use cow, horse, chicken.
Tou can even use dog or human manure or any combination of those.
If you don't have any animals of your own offer to help clean out somebody's barn.
JS: They will think you're crazy, but they'll appreciate it in the end.
JK: Finally, we add water.
Fill the tank with water.
Now, we allow this to incubate for two to three weeks.
Once the bacteria has digested what's in the manure
it's going to get hungry, and it's going to look for food.
And it's going to hatch!
JS: Congratulations!
(Laughter)
JK: You are now the proud parent of a baby dragon,
or what we call a solar cities IBC biodigester.
Seriously, this is how easy and simple the technology is.
But this is a living biological creature that needs to be cared for.
Caring for a home-scale biodigester is just like raising a baby dragon.
The first thing we need to learn about any baby is how to feed her.
She has a mouth but she can't chew: she's just a baby with no teeth.
We use an InSinkErator
to grind our food waste with equal amounts of water
to create baby food.
You can also use a hand grinder or a blender.
It works just as well.
To feed this baby dragon we simply pour the food into her mouth.
It'll go all the way down to the bottom where this pipe is cut at an angle.
There you go.
Once inside the belly of the baby dragon, the food will begin to digest.
A heavier food at the bottom is going to digest more quickly
because it's closest to the greatest number of bacteria.
Oils and food that float to the top,
they're going to digest a little more slowly.
In the middle of the tank is our digested material.
Now we all know, raising a baby is all about bodily functions.
So keep in mind, her belly is full of water
and what goes in must come out.
Yes, your baby dragon pees.
(Laughter)
The liquid will be pulled up through the hole in that smaller pipe.
I guess you can call this section your baby dragon's bladder.
JS: This is liquid gold.
JK: That is our very concentrated and perfect fertilizer.
We can use it on our garden, we can water our lawn with it,
we even share it with our gardening friends.
And unlike composting,
our baby dragon is a closed system at the perfect temperature,
so this fertilizer has lost none of its nutrient value.
And it shows, obviously it shows.
Because my garden has never been as productive or as green.
Small-scale,
but there are many places that can benefit from small-scale biogas.
Our team has chosen three to highlight for you today:
right here in our own backyard of Pennsylvania;
a school in Kenya;
and a refugee camp in the Middle East.
We truly believe that together we can change the world.
Imagine giving women the ability to feed their families
with clean, free cooking fuel made from manure and food waste.
This is Susan.
She lives in the Amish countryside,
in a community that rarely uses electricity tied to the grid.
She has a huge garden, and plenty of garden waste.
She can use that fuel to cook and to heat a part of her home,
and she can put the fertilizer right back on her garden.
We can empower women like Susan here and around the world
to do this in their own backyards.
JS: Imagine that.
JK: This can also be used
in struggling communities around the world.
This is a picture of "Rescue Team Kenya - Community School".
It is located within an overcrowded labyrinth of tin shacks,
in a hot climate,
with no running water and no real toilets.
The man in the orange shirt is Robert Ongera Ombeka.
He lived in the slums, he's self educated, he got himself out of the slum
and now he goes back every day to change lives.
Together we managed to support Robert in setting up this little school
with room enough for 15 students.
Sixty-five children showed up the first day he opened the door.
There is a powerful desire for education in Kenya,
even among the most vulnerable:
the impoverished, the orphaned, the hungry and even the sick.
We are all about education.
We care about empowering individuals to rise above their situation.
But it begins we clean water, food and sanitation.
Together as a community
we managed to bring clean water, food and school supplies
to this little makeshift school.
Imagine these children learning how to grow food
with the fertilizer they helped to make.
Imagine smoke-free cooking in Kenya and around the world.
Millions of people, mostly women and children,
would no longer die from carbon-related illnesses,
every year.
JS: With no need for firewood, imagine an end to deforestation!
JK: The village of Chittoor, India, did it.
They call it the smoke-free village: every family uses a biodigester.
Imagine: free biogas, no need for firewood, and there's more.
Imagine connecting bio digesters to toilets.
That would not only provide them
with better sanitation, clean cooking fuel and fertilizer,
but would also give them dignity.
This is not a toilet that you see here.
This is just the safest place for this young lady to relieve herself
in Mukuru Slum.
Our third idea relates to refugee camps.
Our first experience with refugees was in 2005,
when I became the advisor to a 15 year old boy from Baghdad, Iraq
who came here as a youth ambassador.
We've all seen photos of the refugee camps growing around the world.
This crisis has become so severe
that the number of people living in this refugee camp alone
makes it equal to the second largest city in Jordan.
They have nowhere to go.
This refugee camp has evolved into a city.
This is our crisis, it's happening now.
This is in the news today.
Mass migration, for various reasons, is real.
Camps like this are not going away anytime soon.
Imagine clean, accessible cooking fuel for every family in this refugee camp.
Imagine how simple a process sanitation becomes,
when dealing with human waste and food waste right on-site.
Small-scale biogas is scalable:
we can scale it up and we can scale it down.
Is it for a small family like Susan's,
or is it for a school, like Rescue Team Kenya,
or is it for a community
like the ever-growing number of refugee camps in the world today?
Imagine an end to fracking.
This is natural gas.
Imagine no concerns about pipelines running for your neighborhood,
because we create our own energy.
We keep our waste, it has value.
We turn it into energy, and we benefit.
Imagine freedom from fossil fuels:
countries like India and Sweden
are running buses and trash trucks on biogas.
We can too.
The possibilities are endless.
The rapid spread of this technology could have a profound, global impact.
What can you do?
Go online and learn more about solar cities and biodigestion.
Join the biogas movement, and do this at home.
Share this with your local community leaders,
and encourage your department of agriculture
to take a closer look at small-scale biodigestion.
Through education, innovation and outreach,
through the help of our heroic baby dragons
and a whole lot of love,
we can fix our eyes on a simple overlooked solution
to what we now call waste.
With biogas, there is no waste.
We need you to help spread this gospel of God biogas.
JS: This is the sign language for love.
It's also the sign we're using for biogas.
Inlet, outlet and gas.
Imagine.
(Applause)