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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – October 5, 1998
98-170
Contacts: Joan Pelley or Ron Langley, Public Information, 360-738-6250
Early next year, the company will begin constructing a $5 million "wet-waste fermentation plant" in the north county that will turn manure from dairy cows into methane, which in turn will be converted to electricity.
"I'm pleased about the ingenuity exhibited by these ‘bioneers' – biological pioneers who are creating practical solutions to tough environmental problems," Fitzsimmons said. "In this case, Safe Environmental Inventions has found a way to turn a major environmental hazard – dairy waste – into a safe product with profit-making potential. We need more people and more companies to exhibit this kind of creative thinking on behalf of the environment."
"As the need to deal with waste streams high in liquid content has become more urgent, we took steps to acquire a technical solution," said Kogel, director of Safe Environmental Inventions. Wastes from food processing, agriculture, restaurants and green clippings are all valuable "fuel" for the waste-to-methane plan, he said.
"The plant being built in Whatcom County is geared to a fairly large farm that will be able to solve its manure problems while also creating the energy needed to run the farm," Kogel said. He added that the Northwest Power Planning Council has expressed hope this type of technology can help salmon runs as well as enabling farms to be energy self-sufficient.
"Many kinds of wastes are actually misplaced assets," said Fitzsimmons. "I hope that more and more farmers will start looking on the wastes they produce as a potential economic asset, rather than something they need to get rid of by any means available. With this change of thinking, we could make tremendous progress toward protecting our water, air and soil from many pollution sources."
In addition to methane, the manure fermentation process also yields a valuable concentrated liquid fertilizer and a dry compost that makes an excellent soil amendment or plant-propogation medium, Kogel said.
Safe Environmental Inventions, which specializes in fermentation or "bio-waste conversion" technology, opened its Bellingham office last year. It is affiliated with a German company that has built and installed several similar systems throughout Europe in the past five years.
Copyright © Washington State Department of Ecology. See http://www.ecy.wa.gov/copyright.html.
