Green Technologies (Local Efforts)

[Editor]

Town officials meet in Hackensack as part of collaborative effort in renewable fuel
Friday April 26, 2013, 12:42 PM
BY  JENNIFER VAZQUEZ
Hackensack Chronicle

HACKENSACK - Officials from towns that form part of a collaborative, entertained a representative from Energy Vision, last week, who provided insight on forming a regional waste management system and using renewable fuels for municipal vehicles.


Hackensack joined Englewood, Bogota, New Milford, Teaneck, and Bergenfield — members of the Northern New Jersey Community Foundation collaborative — at an April 17 meeting with special guest Energy Vision President Joanna D. Underwood, center, who detailed how renewable natural gas can play a part in waste management.
DANIELLE PARHIZKARAN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Hackensack joined Englewood, Bogota, New Milford, Teaneck, and Bergenfield — members of the Northern New Jersey Community Foundation collaborative — at an April 17 meeting with special guest Energy Vision President Joanna D. Underwood, center, who detailed how renewable natural gas can play a part in waste management.

The firm's president, Joanna D. Underwood, detailed how renewable natural gas plays a part in waste management.

The towns at the meeting are part of the Northern New Jersey Community Foundation - a non-profit that promotes its partners to identify and resolve regional problems and opportunities through communication, by sharing ideas, best practices, services, and resources, among other things. The towns represented at the meeting were Bergenfield, Bogota, Englewood, Hackensack and Teaneck. New Milford is also a member, but no officials attended.

Underwood said that the town leaders in the collaborative should look into converting their diesel-running heavy-duty vehicles, including garbage trucks, into renewable natural gas vehicles or buy new eco-friendly natural gas vehicles all together.

"We need cleaner fuel for fleets to serve your towns," Underwood said. "Renewable natural gas will reduce health threatening ailments and hearing loss for your heavy duty truck workers, who no one talks about. It will reduce green house gasses, dependence on foreign oil and will effect the towns in a positive economical way."

This idea is a fact in Europe, where "they are turning their waste into fuel," according to Underwood.

"There are 130,000 vehicles using natural gas in this country but we are down the list compared to other countries," she said.

Underwood's suggestion is towns should have fleets that are reliant on renewable natural gas, specifically methane, as opposed to diesel fuel. She further suggests that towns look into creating their own renewable natural gas through the management of waste by either collecting methane emitted from landfills or building an anaerobic digester - a structure that accelerates the process in which microorganisms break down biodegradable material in the absence of oxygen, resulting in methane production.

The suggestion extended into having the towns' heavy duty trucks gather the necessary biodegradable material - be it food or human waste - bring it to a future specified location, whether a landfill or digester, where the methane gathering process can begin. The gas would then power the vehicles - a cheaper and greener alternative to the fuel that is currently in use by the towns. Underwood said the plan is "a full circle" plan.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency website, "Gases that trap heat in the atmosphere are called greenhouse gases." The EPA goes on to describe methane as a gas "emitted during the production and transport of coal, natural gas, and oil. Methane emissions also result from livestock and other agricultural practices and by the decay of organic waste in municipal solid waste landfills."

Municipal officials questioned the impact that a digester facility could have on their community's quality of life. Underwood addressed their concerns by reassuring them that the remaining waste can be used as compost, thus bringing in more ratables to the towns. She also stressed that an anaerobic digester omits, practically, no odor.

"It's less smelly [than a landfill]- relatively close to odorless," she said. "The noise from the big haul vehicles is 50 to 80 percent quieter and are greener. There are high rates of lung cancer and hearing loss for heavy duty truck drivers so [these renewable gas powered trucks] are a healthier alternative."

Englewood City Manager Timothy Dacey voiced his concern over the particulars of having a digester in the area.

"Even if we get legislative approval and county approval, I cannot imagine this getting any traction with Governor Christie," Dacey said. "[The Bergen County Utilities Authority] is covered by a major contract: the county tells us what the contract is and the cost and the state tells us what we have to do."

Hackensack City Manager Stephen Lo Iacono agreed with Dacey.

"This [idea] may have real value but you can't minimize what Tim touched upon," Lo Iacono said. "Nothing is more managed like waste management is. This is a very challenging situation. Maybe it would be better to look into growing our recycling efforts or moving into bio-fuels, but this [idea of an anaerobic digester] is a tough one."

NNJCF President Michael Shannon said that "bureaucracy is not a reason to not go ahead and continue researching the possibility...this is worth pursuing."

"This is a highly specific local matter," Underwood added. "Embarking in a project like this, your town and community can be the game changers for other towns and communities."

The conversation led to the possibility of looking into converting the towns' heavy duty vehicles to be compliant with renewable natural gas. It was concluded that, for the time being, this idea was a more accessible and economically feasible approach.

Though the topics of anaerobic digesters and renewable natural gas took center stage during the NNJCF meeting, Shannon said, via a press release, that these topics were not the main purpose of the meeting.

"The major topic is not the digesters, or developing an organic waste facility in Bergen County....but rather, more generally, the potential of a regionally coordinated, multi-municipality, waste management program."

Email: vazquez@northjersey.com

[Editor]

For Hackensack hospital, food waste is big target for green ambitions
Myles Ma/NJ.com By  Myles Ma/NJ.com   
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on October 24, 2013 at 3:30 PM, updated October 24, 2013 at 3:34 PM

HACKENSACK — Food waste at Hackensack University Medical Center doesn’t go to a landfill.

Almost all of the food that patients or people eating in the cafeteria don’t eat is rolled on a cart to a stainless steel box in the corner of the hospital kitchen.


A recycling station at Hackensack University Medical Center. Officials credited stations like these with increasing recycling rates at the hospital. (Myles Ma/NJ.com)

The staff opens a panel on the machine, unleashing a putrid smell, and dumps the food inside. Inside, there are woodchips and about two pounds of liquidy substance filled with four strains of micro-organisms.

The organisms digest the food at a rate of almost 100 pounds an hour, Ken Vervoordt, operations manager for Hackensack University Medical Center, said. Unlike human digestion, the end result is basically water, which goes right into the drainage system.

The digester, made by a Chestnut Ridge, N.Y. company called BioHitech, turns every 400 pounds of food into about 100 pounds of water. By using the digester, the hospital avoids sending more than 18,000 pounds of food a month to a landfill, which used to cost the hospital $80 a ton.

“It almost pays for the lease of the machine and the extra savings is in the garbage bags that we’re not buying,” Vervoordt said.

HackensackUMC signed a memorandum of understanding with the federal Environmental Protection Agency in February 2012 pledging to cut its carbon footprint. Since then, the food program at the hospital has been one of the biggest targets for cutting waste.

The hospital started renting the food digester even before signing the memorandum.

“It’s really an amazing machine,” Vervoordt said. “We’ve had it about four years.”

Mark Buonanno, director of operations for BioHitech, which moved this year form Allendale, said hospitals are among the company’s fastest growing customer segments. But universities, prisons, hotels, supermarkets and other high producers of organic waste are also big customers, he said.

Aside from the digester, HackensackUMC has also started using all biodegradable cups and plates in its cafeterias. They cost about three times as much as styrofoam, but Vervoordt expects prices to go down as they become more popular.

The hospital has also found a taker for its used cooking oil. In the past, HackensackUMC would pay to get rid of it, but Westwood has agreed to take the about 1,500 pounds a year that the hospital generates.

The borough turns it into biodiesel, which fuels the town’s trucks, Vervoordt said.

The hospital’s use of electronic medical records also cuts down on food waste, by making it easier to see whether patients have been placed on special diets or food restrictions because of tests or procedures. The nutrition assistants at HackensackUMC are in the process of switching over to taking patient orders by using wi-fi connected tablets, which allows them to see changes to those restrictions in real time.

“They go up with tablets and they can see the whole program that has the patient in their bed, what their current diet is, what their current restrictions are, and they can offer them the choices on the menu that are already loaded into the program,” Irma A. Newdorf, director of nutrition and food management for the hospital, said.

The simplest change might be in the cafeteria itself, where the hospital has installed a recycling station that has employees separate trash from food waste and recyclables. For the first few weeks, employees would stand in front of the station, mesmerized by the new choices, but it has paid dividends in the hospital’s recycling rate, said Kyle Tafuri, sustainability coordinator for the Dierdre Imus Environmental Health Center at the hospital.

“When we first started with that recycling station, our recycling rate was around 14 percent,” he said. “Now our recycling rate is around 30 percent.”