Closing The Loop, Waste to Energy

Melissa McGinnis learns that Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream Company is closing the loop with one of their dairy farms by supplying the bi-product of manufactured ice cream back to the farm which is then mixed with manure in one of its methane digesters. The waste is converted to energy and the energy is used by the farm to run its operation, thus closing the loop with waste to a resource!

In this video Melissa is with Andrea Ash at the Vermont headquarters of Ben and Jerry's. Andrea is the natural resources manager and she has the coolest waste resource story.

What they do is use the waste ice cream from the manufacturing floor and we take it to a farm that has what's called a methane digester. What that methane digester does is basically mix their waste ice cream with manure from the dairy farm and they create energy from that. So what is waste for Ben and Jerry's is good resource for a dairy farm, to make energy on farms. It just so happens that those farms produce dairy that goes into Ben & Jerry's ice cream as well. So it's a nice, closely-knit system.

We hope other companies follow what Ben & Jerry's are doing!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• closing
• the
• loop
• ben
• and
• jerrys
• methane
• greenopolis
• recycling
• Landfill
• Trash
• Waste
• electricity
• power
• energy
• garbage
• trash
• sewage
• refuse
• incineration
• eco
• invention
• waste
• generates
• alternative
• inventions

[Thejbirdy]

Eeeyech, I sure hope they don't make THAT a flavor...haha.

WTG guys!