Category Archives: food

First Talk of the Semester! (Spring 2019)

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On March 6, we hosted CleanBay Renewables. They are a sustainable engineering company based in Westover, Maryland, but with a few locations across the area, including in Georgetown, Delaware. It was founded in 2013 by Tom Spangler and is the only business of its kind. CleanBay Renewables uses anaerobic digestion and nutrient removal techniques to fully recycle chicken waste into clean power.

Their technology processes in a fully closed system to avoid waste stream, protecting local ecosystems from harm. This technique not only strengthens the electrical power grid, but it also provides an auxiliary for farmers. Delaware is a national leader in chicken production, so this technology is pivotal for the area.

CleanBay currently has 12 trucks functioning daily and they process 90,000 tons of chicken litter a day- enough to power 9000 homes. annually The digesters they use consume 1.5 million tons of water, but it is sustainably done so that the water returns into the ecosystem after use. Their technology produces biogas and digestate during processing, with the digestate being turned into phosphorus pellets. Given the high phosphorus in the area which hurts aquatic life, these pellets are transported to phosphorus-deficient areas in the nation to help food production.

This new and exciting technology was great to hear about and we would love to see what happens next. For more information, please go to cleanbayrenewables.com or contact us! Check out our Instagram https://www.instagram.com/udgreenliaisons/ for photos from the event!

Ali Mahdi

amahdi@udel.edu

Food and Sustainability

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Professor Wiens is a registered dietitian-nutritionist and teaches nutrition classes at UD. She currently teaches BHAN 130: Sustainability and Food. In this class, students are introduced to the use of local/seasonal food and partner with UD’s farm to enjoy farm-to-table food.

Professor Wiens grew up watching David Suzuki, an environmentalist. She attended UBC and majored in nutrition, which was housed in the health sciences/agriculture department. Subsequently, she was exposed to sustainability when she took agroeconomic classes as an undergrad. Following her time in college, she became a vegetarian and found the closest soap box to talk about topics related to sustainability.

She strongly believes that sustainability is about taking a more holistic approach. While many people think that eating organic is one good way to do so, Professor Wiens stated that “organic” is not a panacea. She mentioned that we can also reduce our eco footprint by: being a locavore more often, choosing organic food wisely, eating more plants, having sympathy for chickens, consuming smaller, wild, local fish, being fair-minded, and creating less waste. She stated that 31-40% of our food is thrown away. That’s more than 20 pounds of food per person every month!

In conclusion, we learned quite a lot about not only sustainability, but also how we as consumers can choose more wisely and help out the environment. Two major keypoints that we took from her talk were that,“sustainability must be livable to be sustainable,” and we must, “strive to be better and not expect perfection.”