hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of the belmont journal a new and growing green source of electricity today involves a process called anaerobic digestion through this process rather than sending organic waste to landfills those wastes are converted into methane gas and the methane gas is then used to produce electricity until recently belmont's board of selectmen had been considering an anaerobic digester as one possible post closure use for the old incinerator site here and tuneful to inform you about what the facility is and is not the belmont journal takes an in depth look and anaerobic digesters we begin today with a conversation with bruce haskell and environmental engineer with langdon environmental langdon has been serving as the environmental consultant to the board of selectmen on a variety of issues involving the post closure use of the belmont old incinerator site waste essentially from disposal and with old incinerators that prompted a series of efforts to try to site facilities that could handle that material and turn it into a clean energy product residual that can be reused  little late in the process do i have that right yes i mean since you know the band came in around two thousand and fourteen and there's been a lot of effort st facilities to start taking this material and reuse it both composting facilities like a leaf yard waste material and there's a competitor in i don't know if that's the right term but a facility in charleston charles tell you it's so there's a facility in charles town that is a transfer facility so a lot of the we found in th digestion on site or composting it can take the materials and cost effectively transported to a more distant location out there and it's got a fairly large capacity to do that more and more of the entities the businesses or the schools or hospitals or whatever that need to not send their organics to landfills or waste energy facilities are are entering into contracts yeah i do understand that but i mean the subject to the ban and they need to find places to take their material so they've entered into an agreement with a facility to to accept the material or their hauler is entering into an agreement offering it that to them as a service thanks for talking with us today bruce that's been very helpful in a dish into today's conversation with bruce haskell the belmont journal recently had the opportunity to visit stop and shops an aerobics digester in southern massachusetts i had the pleasure of talking with roger beliveau the manager of distribution services in stop and shops distribution facility let's listen in to what beliveau had to say about stop and shops and aerobic digester company diverting came along and it presented an idea that looked really interesting which was this a little bit i just are so thinking it all through in the cost of having the material taken away from the stores  like a really good idea or a good way to go about organic material so we began the process process of actually building and starting up our own digesting this plant was built in two thousand and sixteen we to sell everything obviously we want to sell our product but it times things will go bad or we can't donate them because they've gone expired past a due to past or for expiration date so we then take that material we actually put it at six gallons per minute ten gallons a minute whatever it is it needs to keep that digester operating the digester has to stay fall at all times so we st began the process we actually had to fill a and once you've done that you can start feeding it material and as you build it up you fill it once it's full states fall so in order to put more material in it you have to take material out of it and this is where the real piece of the digest a one million dollars square foot warehouse the digester is capable of producing up to forty percent of the energy that is needed to operate at the entire facility there's a number of materials are going through this digestion process even take plants not the soil but will take the plants like the cuts from the floors department where they do all the cut flowers and they start the world that they go bad those can go into this process too so it's really a lot of materials throughout a store that is able to go in this process itself contain from the point of dumping the material into the process it's not self contained up until that point so the containers with the material in it or the bins of fed in the process of lifting have been up and actually tipping it to dump it here then it becomes self contained from that point forward so you could actually see it from here you see two large very large tanks ones much larger than the other one in the smell is really minimal because there are filters in the tanks to keep that odor from actually creating and coming out into the air in the summertime you might smell little bit but very very mild if you would are our goal is to average about ninety five dollars tons per week of material going into it so that would be small compared to a city doing it as an entire city or town doing it would probably create much more organic material than that i think we're doing  through throughout the day in the night the number of employees to manage and operate the digester are to twenty four stop and shop associates in twelve diverse associates that operate and maintain that facility twenty four hours a day seven days a week but one of the issues a starting job was concerned with when we st thought about building a digester and putting it on the site was older we were very concerned that digester i will go one hundred percent over free but it is very much sustained within the process and the digestive process process is i could almost say noise free outside of what happens when we st dump the product into the hopper and it rides up that conveyor everything else is you can't you couldn't tell it was going on you could go out there listen to it even the generators run and you really don't hear a lot of noise my opinion with the way people or the state people of thinking about the environment and everything everything vehicles with it that's good for the value or bad for the environment i believe that things like  together over digestion or whether it be it will digest some of the formal digestion because there are different ways of doing that i believe that is the the up and coming thing because what are we going to do with all that material if we don't fired other ways to make it useful and produce electricity what better way to do it to include today's program by noting that and anaerobic digester has been one of the five alternatives being considered for a belmont's old incinerator site while it now appears that it is not likely then an anaerobic digester will be pursued a final decision will be made by the board of selectmen on march th tune in again to the bell my journal for more information on other post closure use alternatives as well as for up to date information on what the board of selectmen is considering you've been watching a special edition of the belmont journal i'm your host roger coulton thanks for watching i'll talk to you again next time