Workshop description:

Biogas, for energy and valuable soil products, is produced through the anaerobic digestion of organic waste materials. We make a lot of muck! Can we manage the muck we make in such as way that it becomes a valuable resource?

Organic waste such as: sludge filtered from sewage water, food waste, municipal solid waste, manure from livestock operations, yard clippings, and crop residues can be turned into a renewable substitute for natural gas, and a wide variety of soil products, pellets, and compost. There are over 2,200 sites producing biogas in the U.S., and over 10,000 in Europe.

Topics related to biogas present rich opportunities for three dimensional teaching and learning crosscutting the undergraduate, teacher-preparation, and K-12 levels. Join us as we explore biogas production and get hands-on with a homemade biogas digester. The workshop team will offer their ideas from their classroom experience, on ways teachers can integrate the use of digesters in different classroom environments and with a variety of curricula. Topics we'll cover include: calculating the amount of biogas that would be produced from a certain volume of food waste, determining the size of the digester tank required to produce biogas, and considering applications for the biogas that is produced, including determining how much grid-accessible electricity can be generated from the produced biogas. We will show a producing biogas generator set-up at the workshop. Workshop participants will be hands-on constructing their own biogas generator to take back to their institutions. Back in the classroom, teachers can have students work with digesters to generate biogas with food scraps from the school cafeteria.